Here, however, is an undergraduate perspective on its politics, time-weathered.

John Hopkins University is science in a conservatism-style.

Johns Hopkins University is in a class by itself, politically.  Its School of Advanced International Studies is located in D.C. and as governmentally on the inside as academia can get.  Its official newspaper gets large regular ads from the NSA, just down the road to Annapolis, and the Social Security Administration, past the city's western border.  Milton S. Eisenhower was the president of JHU when his brother was president of the country, and he is remembered very, very well.

At the same time, most students are nonpolitical.  The college is career-oriented.  Perhaps that means conservative to many of us.  Someone remembered well at Johns Hopkins University is its only graduate to become President, and a graduate graduate, Woodrow Wilson.  Who was he?  The man who became governor of NJ from being president of Princeton.  The Southerner who broke the Yankee lock on the White House saying that while racism was terrible, forbidding it would cause another civil war.  The President who won a second term on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War", then went to war, losing a million Americans.  The President who encouraged the separate peace of Germany with the new Soviet regime, and then invaded Russia.  (Did you know America invaded Russia in 1918?  Joe, you probably did.  But if you really went to Johns Hopkins, you wouldn't say it except in your paper, if you valued - not your grade but your reputation as a person who makes any sense intellectually, even though everyone in the room probably knows it, too.)

Woodrow Wilson also supported the principle of self-determination that made Eastern Europe independent and advocated the League of Nations until he nearly died of it.

Johns Hopkins students are bright and know it.  They're internationalist.  They're realist in the extreme.  Most quirky of all, though, to paraphrase Wilson (and to generalize), they feel they ought to remake the world in the spitting image of the world they know. That doesn't mean they are conservative in general, it just means that their faith in science includes faith in the scientific consensus, arrived at by the best and the brightest and immovable so long as their lungs draw breath.  (I think that paraphrases McGeorge Bundy.  Any questions?)

"I looked and saw and wondered why/my city was gone."  Chrissie Hynde

Having come from one of the soft disciplines myself, Anthropology, I kinda agree that most of what PoliSci and Econ put out is pretty vapid.  ESPECIALLY when they use rational choice models, which Econ seems always to do (thus the "it's only a model" claim) and which is increasingly common in PoliSci.

The hard sciences really are different.  They have math.  You can talk about things in math, and the meaning of the equations always stay the same.  The equation might be wrong, or it might be right, but it means the same thing to everybody.  Furthermore, some things can be proven unequivocally wrong.  That really helps.  

The soft sciences can't communicate much about gender or kinship or discrimination in math, andh thus have to use words to describe it.  The meanings of words and sentences shift from person to person, reader to reader.  Therefore no two people ever read the same article or book, and therefore any discipline which has to communicate through words has to wade through mud to do much of anything because it's so gosh darn hard to agree on terms and meanings.  Furthermore, you can't really prove anything definitively wrong, because the basis for which you judge something to be wrong or right is just as subjective as the words you used to describe the thing under discussion to begin with.

And to the poster who mentioned Heisenberg . . . really.  Until you can do the math necessary to understand what exactly Heisenberg meant with the uncertainty principle (and given that it deals with quantum phenomenon, you simply CANNOT understand any way other than mathematically - it is too inhuman), don't go extrapolating him to the whole world.  It just looks bad.