“A statistically impossible lack of diversity”

John Tierney at the NYT reported on Jonathan Haidt’s call to his fellow social scientists to include more of a particular kind of minority.

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal.

…

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

No doubt, anyone in academia with the slightest leanings to views regarded as conservative knows exactly what he’s talking about.

Among other recommendations Haidt proposes his colleagues adopt is a sort of “affirmative action” goal of having 10 percent of their membership be ideologically conservative by 2020.

Hold on there, big fella. You sure you aren’t being too aggressive to get social scientists to actually raise the number of conservatives they count as real colleagues to a whopping ten percent—and in just 10 years? The mind spins.