The political views of American academics have been the subject of research about university faculty in the United States. Some^{[contradictory]} demographic studies indicate that there are more professors in the US who identify as liberal, left-leaning, or Democrat than there are who identify as conservative, right-leaning, or Republican, and that this disparity is significant in certain regions. The cause and effects of the distribution of political views continues to be debated in both the academic literature and the popular press.

Research

Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens were the first scholars to conduct a systematic survey of the politics of American university professors. The research, which was commissioned in 1955 by an arm of the Ford Foundation in response to McCarthyism, was focused solely on social scientists. Lazarsfeld found that just 16% of the social scientists he surveyed self-identified as Republicans, while 47% self-identified as Democrats.^{[1][2]: 25–27}

A second major survey was conducted in 1969 by Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset. Funded by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Ladd and Lipset's study surveyed more than 60,000 respondents at 303 colleges and universities and was not limited to those working in the social sciences.^{[3][2]: 28–29} Ladd and Lipset found that about 46% of professors described themselves as liberal, 27% described themselves as moderates, and 28% described themselves as conservative. Among college students, 45% self-identified as liberal.^[2]: 29

Beginning in 1989, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has conducted a survey of American university faculty every three years. Like the later Carnegie studies, these surveys do not focus on professor's' political beliefs, and contain only a single question about professors' politics. The HERI survey showed negligible change in the number of professors who described themselves as far left or liberal between 1989 and 1998, with approximately 45% of those surveyed self-identifying as liberals or far left.^[4][2]

In 1993, Richard F. Hamilton and Lowell L. Hargrens analyzed data from the 1969 Carnegie survey and two lesser follow-up surveys, and found that despite considerable public debate over a perceived liberal bias in academia, there was little evidence that academia was becoming increasingly liberal. Rather, they found that the number of professors who self-identified as leftists was "fairly constant" throughout the period between 1969 and 1984, while "the overall or not tendency...was towards greater conservatism." In 1984, 40% of the professors surveyed described themselves as liberal or left, while 27% described themselves as moderate and 34% described themselves as conservative or strong conservative.^[5] Hamilton and Hargrens wrote that they were unable to use data from a 1989 Carnegie follow-up, because the wording of the survey's questions had been altered,^[5] but political scientist Neil Gross has used later Carnegie data to suggest that the movement to the right which Hamilton and Lowell detected was a temporary one.^[2]: 31

A 2011 study disagreed with this conclusion and instead predicted that the average view may shift further left in the future. The study also found that the years of college education had little effect on the political view of undergraduates.^[6][7]

Sociologists John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick have also taken issue with conservative scholars and writers' argument that "an overwhelmingly left and liberal faculty has taken over American colleges and universities," arguing that while such claims had gained significant attention, "there have been very few systemic, scholarly analyses of the topic." Criticizing other scholars' selective use of unrepresentative data and poor survey methodologies, Zipp and Fenwick concluded that while liberals certainly outnumbered conservatives in academia, there was no reliable evidence for the popular conservative claim that there were "seven to ten liberals for every conservative on campus."^[8]

According to Gross, much of the research on the political beliefs of college and university professors that has been published since the late 1990s has been conducted by outspoken conservative and libertarian intellectuals, whose primary goal was "to document how far left academia had veered in order to mount a more effective critique of it." Many of these researchers, according to Gross, have made "a number of poor methodological choices, as well as leaps of logic, because of their strong political commitments."^[2]: 33 In another major work co-authored with Solon Simmons, Gross and Simmons have written that there has been "a concerted mobilization on the part of conservative activists, think tanks, foundations and professors aimed at challenging so-called liberal hegemony in higher education" since the late 1990s. Much recent research into the issue, according to Simmons and Gross, "has been beholden to this program."^[9]: 20

Gross and Simmons conducted a study with the intent of minimizing confounders, and specifically singled out recent studies by Gary A. Tobin and Aryeh K. Weinberg,^[10] Daniel Klein and Andrew Western,^[11] and Rothman, Licther and Nevitte study for methodological problems that "might be traceable to a desire to score political points."^[9]: 21 Known as the Politics of the American Professoriate (PAP) survey, Gross and Simmons' survey received a relatively high response rate of 51%, corrected for response bias, and surveyed a large sample of nearly 3,000 professors from representative institutions.^{[9]: 21–24} They concluded that 44% of their respondents could be classified as liberals, 46% as moderates, and 9% as conservatives.^{[9]: 25–26} In terms of party affiliation, 51% of respondents were Democrats, 36 percent were Independents, and 14 percent were Republicans. Gross and Simmons compared this data to the Gallup poll, which found that 34% of Americans were Democrats, 34% were independents, and 30% were Republicans in 2006, concluding that "Democrats are doing better inside than outside academe by a margin of about 16 percentage points."^[9]: 29

In a 2013 study, Gross compared Rothman, Licther, and Nevitte's corrected data, data collected by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) in 2004 and 2005, and Gross and Simmons' PAP survey, noting that all three data sets suggested that between 50 and 60 percent of professors were liberal, and that it was a "reasonable conclusion" that "between 50% and 60% of academics fall somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum."^[2]: 56 As Gross notes, this sets the American professoriate apart from the American public, approximately 17% of whom are leftist or liberal.^[2]: 7

A 1999 survey conducted by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte found that professors with liberal socio-political views outnumbered their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 5 to 1 in the United States, with the former constituting 72% of the faculty body and the latter representing 15%.^[12] The study was criticized by political scientists Barry Ames, David C. Barker, Chris W. Bonneau, and Christopher J. Carman, who argued that it was "plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence."^[13] Rothman, Licther and Nevitte's study was later revealed to have contained a coding error, which exaggerated the percentage of professors holding liberal views by 12%.^[2]: 55

In a 2017 survey of university presidents, two-thirds of respondents suggested that political demonstrations and protests on university campuses has contributed to the public perception that academia is in opposition to conservative viewpoints. A majority of presidents also agreed that the 2016 election revealed the divide between academia and the American public.^[14] In a 2018 iteration of the survey, 86% said that the public opinion of academia as left-biased was responsible for declining public support.^[15]

Authors of a 2015 study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences found that "By 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1."^[16]

A 2015 Harvard University study found that 8% of students identifying as Democrats said they would not feel comfortable sharing their political views at school, while 21% of Republican students felt the same way.^[17]

Regional and field-based differences

Professor Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College conducted a study which found that the effect of political differences in academia was most pronounced in the northeast region of the United States. Whereas the average ratio of liberal to conservative professors is 6:1 nationally, in New England, it is 28:1.^[18] Abrams described the effect within the region as pushing conservative professors "to the edge of extinction" and "a canary in the higher education coal mine, undercutting the mission of college and diminishing the value of six-figure educations". Conservative faculty and students in New England are described as "feeling more marginalized and alienated than ever before".^[19]

A 2016 study examining voter registration at 40 universities found that large differences exist among individual institutions. The ratio of self-identified Democrats to Republics among professors of social sciences was 60:1 at Brown University, and 40:1 at Boston University, while the ratio was much more balanced at other schools, including Pepperdine University, (1.2:1), Case Western Reserve University (3.1:1), and Ohio State University (3.2:1). This study also found that even within the social sciences, there is a divide among fields, with history professors having a 33.5:1 ratio, and economics professors having a 4.5:1 ratio.^[20]

In May 2018, the conservative advocacy group^[21] National Association of Scholars stated that among the faculty of 51 liberal arts colleges, 39 percent of the institutions employed no faculty who were registered Republicans. In this sample, the aggregate number of faculty registered as Democrats exceeded those registered as Republicans by a ratio of 10.4:1, which increased to 12.7:1 if two military academies, West Point and Annapolis were excluded. The ratio was lower in the STEM fields, such as chemistry, mathematics, and physics, as well as economics.^[22]

Effects

On conservative professors

For the 2016 book-length study Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University (by Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn), 153 conservative professors were interviewed.^[23] Citing research, the authors describe these professors as a "stigmatized minority" and having to use "coping strategies that gays and lesbians have used in the military and other inhospitable work environments" in order to hide their political identity.^[19] Shields stated his view that the populist right may overstate the bias that does exist and that conservatives can succeed using mechanisms like academic tenure to protect their freedom.^[24] In a review of Passing, Paul Hollander states that "few liberals or leftists would admit that conservatives are discriminated against" but that "anti-conservative bias resembles other, earlier prevalent racial, ethnic, or sexist biases, which too were always vehemently denied".^[25] In another review, Bradley C.S. Watson observes that "(c)onservatives labor under what liberals might call systemic discrimination and glass ceilings".^[26]

Theories and implications

In recent years, the focus of academic discussion of faculty ideology has shifted away from estimation of faculty viewpoints to the study of whether faculty views affect or are transferred to the views of their students. In a 2008 study, Mariani and Hewitt found that faculty views do not tend to influence or change the political views of their students. Moreover, the authors noted that conservatives tend to self-select out of academia and prefer other professions.^{[27]: 774–75}

Politically conservative authors have long argued that liberal faculty members outnumber conservative ones, and indoctrinate their students with liberal views. William F. Buckley made this argument in his 1951 work, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom", and works such has Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals have made similar arguments.^[27] In fact, however, there is little evidence that the political orientation of faculty members affects the political attitudes of their students.^[28] A 2008 study by Mack D. Mariani and Gordon J. Hewitt found no evidence that faculty ideology was "associated with changes in students' ideological orientation" and concluded that students at more liberal schools "were not statistically more likely to move to the left" than students at other institutions.^[27] Similarly, Staneley Rothman, April Kelly-Woessner, and Mathew Wossner found in 2010 that students' "aggregate attitudes do not appear to vary much between their first and final years," and wrote that this "raises some questions about charges that campuses politically indoctrinate students."^{[29]: 77–78}

See also

• Academic bias
  • Political views of professors in the United States
  • Universities and antisemitism
• Media bias
• Political correctness in education
• Heterodox Academy

References