Are you a Republican? Then you are dumb, dumb, dumb -- and greedy. News reports last week showing that Republicans are a miniscule minority in the ivory towers of academia, unsurprisingly, has brought out the smarter-than-thou Democrats.

To the Editor:

Re "Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find" (news article, Nov. 18):

Would it be surprising to find mostly Republicans among oil company executives? Simply ask what the population in question is trained and paid to do.

Academics are trained to reason using logic, to question evidence and to consider and evaluate several possible interpretations of events. All these activities are discouraged and indeed ridiculed by the present Republican leadership.

Academic Republicans must indeed suffer from this cognitive dissonance.

Markus Meister
Pasadena, Calif., Nov. 18, 2004
The writer is a professor of biology at Harvard.

To the Editor:

The view that campus collegiality leads to tyranny of the majority has some plausibility in explaining the absence of Republicans from academia, but the main causes clearly lie elsewhere.

A successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience, along with a lack of interest in material incentives. All these are antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.

John McCumber
Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2004
The writer is a professor of Germanic languages at U.C.L.A.

Does anyone want to bet that these "enlightened" "intellectuals" are the same ones who attempt to turn their classrooms into indoctrination centers?