I'm curious: What are their cultural barriers? I'm a Communications major, so I'm non-STEM, and I'd like to know what you think the social barriers are. Sports? Fashion?
I'm talking about the extreme left-wing bias in the academy - if you want to be a professor at an accredited university in the U.S., it's very difficult to do so if you have anything resembling a conservative slant to your beliefs. To be fair I also should have included professional schools such as law, medicine, business, etc with STEM. It's also not impossible for a right-wing person of exceptional ability to do well outside those fields - Robert George is a famous example. On the whole, though, professors in the U.S. tend to be on the far left of the political spectrum.
Hold on, now. Are we talking "far left" for American standards, or far left for the real world? Because I've come to realize that in America, supporting things like health care reform and gay marriage get me tagged as left-wing, when in reality I suppose I'm closer to the right than I am to the left.
The right wing in America is batshit insane. I'm perfectly delighted to have them stay away from education. But regarding an actual conservative viewpoint, I find my professors tend to be pretty evenly mixed. I've got two or three this semester who're all for the free market and capitalism, and I've got two or three who'd prefer more government control over things. I don't think people from either side think gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, or that women shouldn't be permitted to abort, but again, I don't see that as left-wing. That's just common sense.
Perhaps there's some left wing bias, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it extreme. Furthermore, you can be a right-wing student in any of those fields and face no enormous barrier whatsoever, and that's what this is a discussion of. So I'd still argue that the computer science division has a more extreme cultural gap. (Further: Have you tried being a right-wing computer science major? I was talking to a guy at UMaryland and told him I was taking an advertising class and he accused me of "raping and pillaging" America. That's way lefter than you'd find in any other field, except maybe English, and English majors are mild-mannered.)
