In baseball, fans of different teams can agree on general issues of baseball rules, umpiring, and performance evaluation because such matters are separable from team support. In academia, however, we find research, standards for research, and standards for standards. Criticizing standards is a form of research sometimes called "methodology." Methods, standards, norms, and practices evolve to form a mass without definite order or priority.

Professors often omit important things and point in an unfortunate direction without making any false statement. Alongside truth, then, is judgment of importance--the issues, the positions, the arguments, the audiences. In our view, one's ideological sensibilities and commitments are often intimately bound up with one's notions of the academic enterprise. One's positions on how performance should be umpired or evaluated and one's "team" support are not separable.

We think vital discussion of ideology in academia is bound to be ideological, and that good scholarship calls on us to declare that what principally motivates the present investigation is our belief that, by and large, the humanities and social science professors are weak in certain sensibilities that we hold. Specifically, there is little classical liberalism. In policy terms, classical liberalism favors domestic reform generally in the directions of significantly decontrolling markets and personal choice, cutting the welfare state, and depoliticizing society. A further policy feature of classical liberalism, in our view, is a strong disposition against military entanglements abroad. . . .

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