Academia _as a whole_ is biased against republicans/libertarians/capitalists and toward the state, i.e. towards leftism, because thats where their paychecks come from. He who pays the piper, calls the tune.
Plenty of academics (and others) bite the hand that feeds them: they take their money from exactly those whom they criticize.
This is in fact necessary for academic freedom. Just because you fund something at some university doesn't mean you get to dictate everyone's public expression there, as if that institution were a corporate subsidiary.
However, in practice, those who are close to some particular project involving an outside agency probably face repercussions if they express criticism of that agency.
Not necessarily Republicans, since they are statists too, although somewhat less than Dems.
But for the sake of argument, yes, conservatives tend to be biased against statist academia because they are aware that since academia wouldnt exist without a state it is biased toward the state and against contra-statists.
The notion that conservatives would indeed be biased against an independent, non-statist academia, simply because they are -as is often implied- biased against knowlege itself, is not convincing.
> The notion that conservatives would indeed be biased against an independent, non-statist academia, simply because they are -as is often implied- biased against knowlege itself, is not convincing.
This is a complete straw man. Nobody is saying conservatives would be biased against 'knowledge itself'.
What is being suggested is that they would be biased against social psychological research with the potential to change ideas about power relations away from supporting the status quo.
Furthermore, if as you say, conservatives are supportive of this research being done, but just object to 'statist' academia, you will easily be able to prove that by pointing us to the independent institutions they have funded.
I think you're operating from a serious misconception about the Republican party- they advocate and have historically voted for extremely strong State power, just distributed for a greater degree of regional control.
Even if they all rode rusty bicycles, basic logic implies that they won't/can't bite the hand that feeds them simply because obviously nobody else would voluntarily feed them and they're (obviously) intelligent enough to realize this.
Its a synergy. The state provides the academia funds nobody else would voluntarily provide them. In return, academia produces statists. Cue vicious circle of win-win.
People in academia are absolutely driven by money: they need funding to purchase equipment, hire grad students, and pay their salary. Also, whether or not to grant tenure is judged (in part) by how much grant money an assistant professor has brought into the university.
The effort of the American Right to coopt libertarian identity (one of a series of such attempts that arose in an effort to regain electoral ground in the realignment after the rise of the New Deal Coalition -- including the effort to coopt white racial identity in the Southern Strategy, and the effort to coopt Christian religious identity thereafter) clearly has met with some success.
In the real world, however, right authoritarianism and left libertarianism are real things.
> Fascism, communism, nazism, socialism, etc, are subsets of leftism/statism.
They are generally subsets of statism (presuming by "communism" you mean Leninism and its descendants; with Marxism-qua-Marxism the issue is less clear, and "communism" is even more general and includes some things which are probably more accurately seen as left-libertarian), but only some subsets of that list have any real relationship to the left.
Fascism and Nazism are probably best seen as pure authoritarian; each borrows rhetorical approaches from both the Left and the Right to support authoritarianism, but neither really orients toward the Right or Left in anyway that is distinguishable from its orientation toward authoritarianism, except perhaps to the extent that one sees nationalism vs. internationalism as tied to the right/left divide (there's some traditional association of nationalism with the Right and internationalism with the Left), as both Nazism and Fascism are strongly nationalist.
> There's also the growth of institutional power that characterizes much of Fascism; that's usually associated with the Left
No, growth in institutional power is not "usually associated with the Left". Left and Right differ on who holds power and how it is used, authoritarian vs. libertarian split on the degree of institutional power.
In a sense, libertarian and left are both different generalizations of classical liberalism to a new environment -- in the environment in which classical liberalism arose, political and economic power were conjoined and distributing political power was equivalent to distributing economic power. Libertarianism (in ideal -- practical effects may differ) focusses on continuing distribution of formal political power by limiting the power of central political institutions even as economic power has become increasingly divorced from the central institutions, Leftism (again, in ideal) focusses on continuing distribution of economic power among individuals irrespective of whether its present locus in central political institutions or not.
Leftists will generally argue that distributing economic power is the best way of distributing political power, while Libertarians will argue the reverse.
That's true, but you didn't mention that prior to distributing economic power equally, leftists must first centralize it. Further, as a means of administrating the continued equitable distribution of monies, political power is gathered in institutions.
That's not the only reason, though; many leftists do not actually believe in distributing political power at all. The position that the state has a complete monopoly on the use of force is an example of this.
> Same question, how could a stateless communism possibly work?
In even Marxist theory, communism-as-a-system (communism-as-an-ideology is simply the ideology which seeks communism-as-a-system as its ultimate goal) is what happens to socialism (which uses the State) when it succeeds and the State withers away.
If the State hasn't withered away, you have (in Marxist parlance) socialism-as-a-system even if you have communism-as-an-ideology that motivates the present use of socialism-as-a-system. You can't have communism with a State.
(Whether you can have communism at all in practice is still an open question.)
By the way, just for kicks, here's a quote from Marx:
The contradiction between the vocation and the good intentions of the administration on the one hand and the means and powers at its disposal on the other cannot be eliminated by the state, except by abolishing itself; for the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities, since the scope of its own power comes to an end at the very point where civil life and work begin. Indeed, when we consider the consequences arising from the asocial nature of civil life, of private property, of trade, of industry, of the mutual plundering that goes on between the various groups in civil life, it becomes clear that the law of nature governing the administration is impotence. For, the fragmentation, the depravity, and the slavery of civil society is the natural foundation of the modern state, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation of the state in antiquity. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.