Tolerance, part 4

My last post on tolerance mentioned the idea that its relationship with ideology is shifting.  In this post, I'm going to look at the evidence from the General Social Survey, which asks about whether certain kinds of people whose ideas are often considered "bad or dangerous" should be allowed to teach in a college or university:  a Communist, someone who is "against churches and religion," someone who "believes that Blacks are genetically inferior," and someone who favors "doing away with elections and letting the military run the country."  I look at a count of the number of these cases that the person thinks should be allowed to teach, broken down by education (college graduate vs. not) and self-rated ideology (liberal, moderate, or conservative). 

First, people without a college degree:



A pretty steady upward trend in in all groups, although a little faster among moderates and conservatives, especially in the early years. The gap between liberals and conservatives was about two-thirds as big at the end of the period for which data are available (1976-2018) as at the beginning.

Next, people with a college degree:



Upward trends among moderates and conservatives, but a slight downward trend among liberals.  At the end of the period, liberals are still the most tolerant group, but the gap between liberals and conservatives is only about 30% as it was as at the beginning.

So college-educated liberals are still the most tolerant group by this measure, but the gap is smaller than it used to be.  College-educated liberals are the one group that has become less tolerant over the period.  

To return to contemporary controversies, I think that the pressures for intellectual conformity have grown and the range of acceptable opinions has shrunk over the time that I've been a professor (since 1987), and that this trend has probably accelerated in the last ten years or so.  If that's true, one possible explanation is that the trend among college-educated liberals is stronger among university faculty--that is, tolerance has declined sharply rather than slightly.  The GSS sample isn't large enough to test this--there are only about 500 "post-secondary teachers" in the cumulative file.  However, based on personal observation, I doubt that's the case--for example, I'd guess that if there were a referendum by secret ballot of Princeton faculty on whether there should be "a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty" it would be rejected by an overwhelming margin (and that many of the faculty who signed the letter calling for it would vote no).  Rather, I think there's a process of "crankification" (to borrow a term invented by Paul Krugman) in which almost everyone who takes a public stand commits themselves to extreme positions, even if those aren't popular with the relevant public.  Strangely, although casual observations suggests that "crankification" is pretty common, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of theory and research about when and why it happens.  (This paper by Cass Sunstein has some relevant material, but he presents it as a "general law" rather than a variable).