Bridging a cultural divide

"Studies find" that there are far more registered Democrats in universities than there are registered Republicans.  These "studies" showed that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a ratio of 9 to 1 at Berkeley and Stanford.  Other studies showed a 7-to-1 ratio for professors in the humanities and social sciences.

In Evangelical Protestant churches, the ratio is tilted more toward Republicans, though not quite as heavily.

Can these two groups profit by mixing?  A professor at Harvard thinks so:

The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side a mystery.

It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.

Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side would learn something important and useful from the other side.

Read the whole article.  [via Glenn Reynolds]

Here's more on the lack of political diversity in academia with examples from past administrations.