A letter I wrote in response to Tierney's Op-Eds

Links to Tierney's two Op-Ed pieces: number 1 and number 2.

And here is my rebuttal letter:

After reading your last two articles, I am left with a number of comments I would like to share.

First of all, I must state that it is very surprising to me that after you wrote columns about how the innate differences between men and women lead to the fact that the top tier Scrabble players are predominately men, that you cannot understand that differences between the way liberals and conservatives think affect what career paths they choose.

You cite examples of where a conservative student in Sociology or English might have trouble pursuing their research interests, which is a valid point, but does not explain why fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or Engineering are also very much dominated by liberals. In fact, it has been my experience that all fields of academia are dominated by liberals, whether or not politics are related to the field in question. The fact that liberals dominate every branch of academia actually weakens your claim that law professors, English professors, sociology professors and other humanities professors act maliciously to drive away conservatives. To even think about making this claim, you would need some sort of statistic that Law, English, Sociology and other humanities fields have more of a liberal bias than other fields. I would very much like to hear your reasons for why Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, etc. also have this "liberal bias".

I also disagree that there are many conservative scholars who pursue Ph.D.s but choose to work in think tanks over academia. As a Ph.D. student at Harvard, the number of conservatives I meet are very few and far between so I would argue that those who choose to pursue a Ph.D. are much more likely to be liberal. As an undergrad, I noticed that the split between conservatives and liberals was not very big, so perhaps conservatives are more likely to go to professional schools or get jobs than liberals are.

You should be able to sleep easier at night, knowing that Republicans have been making every attempt to shoot down "liberal" branches of research such as evolution, stem cell research, and global warming.

My life experiences and observations cause me to strongly disagree with much of your article. I do not dispute the facts, but the conclusions you drew from them.