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Just left my office. Will update this later. I'm actually quite interested in this topic and would have got to it without a prompt
Edit: Ok, this is an interesting question and there are a lot of different facets to it. I'm going to comment on the humanities side of things far more, for reasons that should be obvious.
First off, what is the academy? Well, it's a place of ideas. Specifically, of dealing with the ideal - idealism. This isn't just in the colloquial sense, but the academy got its start with the Socratics (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - specifically Plato, but Aristotle is very important for its development as well). Plato's philosophy, in general, was focused on the ideal - Platonic forms, which is literally the borderline divine idea sphere which informs brute materiality with its metaphysical content. Basically, individual things are what they are because they participate in ideal forms - so truth (see: what Plato thinks is real), for Plato, is based in the ideal.
Platonic thinking is the origin of the academy. As Alfred North Whitehead interprets - I think accurately - "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (from Process and Reality). Basically, he's saying that Plato's idealism is the defining characteristic of European philosophy at large, whether the thinkers are engaging in it (what we might call metaphysics) or responding to it. You only start to see real systemic challenges to this idealism in the last few centuries, and figures like Baruch Spinoza who buck that trend are one offs, while figures like Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, etc, who operate in various spheres of the ideal - they operate in metaphysical framings.
Why does this matter? The tradition that the academy comes from is defined by this idealism. That systemic opposition I spoke about has a variety of forms, but let's say that Friedrich Nietzsche is a great avatar for this. He brings in some really interesting point about the relationship between the ideal and the real. It's a bit complicated, but let's give it a go. This is from Nietzsche's The Twilight of the Idols.
"How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth
HISTORY OF AN ERROR
1. The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man – he dwells in it, he is it.
(Oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)*
2. The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (‘to the sinner who repents’).
(Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible – it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian…)
3. The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative.
(Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.)†
4. The real world – unattainable? Unattained, at any rate. And if unattained also unknown. Consequently also no consolation, no redemption, no duty: how could we have a duty towards something unknown?
(The grey of dawn. First yawnings of reason. Cockcrow of positivism.)‡
5. The ‘real world’ – an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer – an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)
6. We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps?… But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!
(Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA)*"
The error that he's giving a history of here is, to simplify, Platonic metaphysics - or, Platonic idealism. It's the idealism that the academy was built around, and still (i'd argue) operates within. The distinction he's giving here is between the world which Plato said was real world (idealism, the forms, etc) and the apparent world (the brute world of materiality - what you see around you). He's saying that the real world (IE - Plato's idealism) being treated as real is an error, and the actual real thing (brute materiality) was always the actual real, but the dominant prejudice of the Western tradition is to treat the ideal as the real, when it is in fact the unreal.
Where does this leave us? With idealism/metaphysics, in a Nietzschean schema, being a dominant error which is a framing that dominates over the actual real (brute materiality). The academy has its roots, and much of its existent bias, rooted in the error side of the history of an error. Academics come into the university and theorize about stuff - they operate in ideal framings which they bring to the point of theory. The rest is beyond them - the academy is the place of ideas, of the ideal, and academics aren't generally the ones who bring their own ideal framings beyond the academy. (side note - there is a modern branch of thinking that stems from the Nietzschean reasoning, ironically as it is primarily feminist, which tries to break away from the ideal framings which are the hallmark of the academy - things like Haraway's god trick, Hayles' focus on materiality and the posthuman, Drucker's focus on feminist data analytics, etc. The irony is, the people who study this stuff don't realize they're basically deriving their framings from a rampant misogynist)
Given this general framing, the whole premise of "the real world has a left bias" or something is actually argued against by major intellectual framings in the academy itself. The real world (in the estimation of the academy) is the ideal framings they operate in - not the world of brute materiality. Nietzschean framing counts this as a gross and long standing error, and the real world/apparent world valuation is (in reality) inverted over that holdover from Platonism that dominates the academy. The academy is specifically a space where the limiting factor is supposed to be human reasoning - so, theory framings and whatnot - whereas the brute material world beyond it has limits of practice. The ideas, the theories, that arise within the ideal space of the university are brought into the world beyond the academy and tested not by reason, but by their ability to perform in a world of brute materiality and simple practicality. The long and short of it? In Nietzschean terms, the "real" world is much more rightly considered to be the world beyond the university, where the rubber hits the road, and we bobble heads are basically ideal-framing machines who come up with a bunch of theories in a rarified environment which distances itself from actual reality (the world beyond the Platonic academy) as much as possible.
Does reality have a left wing bias? Not according to the Niezschean school of thought. That whole framing is, itself, a bias based on the 2500'ish year error of Plato's ideal framing, falsely inverting reality and the apparent world. The people who operate in that framing, according to Nietzsche, don't have damned thing to do with the real world, and they live in a bubble of error propped up by centuries of habit, biases ingrained deeply into thought, and the core of the space they inhabit. In Nietzschean terms, the whole academic conception of the real is a bias, and an inversion of reality.
That's the type of bullshit answer an academic would (and did) give. But, I like to think of it this way... If you want something done day to day, I don't call an academic. They're - we're - useless bobble heads who blabber on and reason our way through this and that, and need people to do our paperwork, change our tires, make things actually run, etc. Watching a bunch of professors organize tables in a conference hall is like watching cats try and fuck a doorknob. When it comes to actually getting things done, navigating that world of practicality, the ideal framings of the university have offered remarkable utility in navigating the world - but the academics themselves have rarely been the ones to navigate the apparent (see: the Nietzschean actual real) world to make those ideal framings navigable.
The longwinded, academic blowhard answer? The academic (see: the general mode by which the academy operates) notion of reality is an inversion, and the people who bring the ideal framings of the academics out into the apparent (see: real) world don't tend to be academics. They might be educated, but academics are the useless tits who hang around university forever. Not without their utility, but they don't even live in the apparent (see: real) world by the estimation of some of the greatest critics of the academic tradition to ever lived.
Anyways, just wanted to thank you for saying I was a PhD candidate! I think the last time you guessed my education level you said I was an MA. I guess I blew right past my MA thesis and my Field of Study. At this rate, I should be a real Fake Doctor in a year or two
(side note: The sections "Biology and the Drive to Knowledge: Perspectivism and "The Origins of Reason and Logic" - if I can recall their names off hand - from Nietzsche's The Will to Power [Kaufmann translation] are great reads in this area)
(other side note: I'm not proofreading any of this, so if there are errors or sentences that trail off, deal with it)
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