Academia by nature has always been left leaning. It's the pursuit of the ideal.
It tries to balance out with the aggressive ones in the real world.
Then again it's all relative on where you stand.

3 last posts are concise and good, agreed there. And perhaps MM's take on the ignorance of the average man is an assumption.

Originally Posted by major liability

I don't know what street you're finding these "average" men on, but I have yet to meet anyone that ignorant in reality... even among high school dropout stoners.

Maybe it's more prevalent in other parts of the country.

Try more than half of my high school.

Can't find Ohio much less Afghanistan or Iraq...

And no, DTop, I agree that colleges can be left leaning. But it's got nothing to do with the media.

I don't accept the notion that colleges are liberal at all, I think that very much depends on the college.

If you look at colleges south of Mason Dixon you'd be hard pressed to find a liberal college. When I visited colleges in Florida in 1990, for example I didn't find them so liberal. And in the midwest (where I did go to school), liberal schools were in short supply.

And for people who think Americans are ignorant a study done in 2002 shows only 17% of young adults (military age) could find Iraq in Afghanistan on a map. As TOG stated, I would be surprised if 50% of people could find every state on the map.



http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...perSurvey.html

And of course I am not the only one to think we have become ignorant Walter Cronkite happens to agree.

http://newsbusters.org/node/1824

Mmarsh got a good point here actually. It's going to depend on where you are. I still think that academia does have more of a leftist tendency though if anything due to their liberal arts departments. Liberal arts are... well... liberal. And you will be hard pressed to find them in numbers outside of universities.