liberal academia
about a week ago, my brow furrowed as i read this hogwash:
I’ve often laughed at the conservative belief that academics is dominated by tendentious liberal ideologies. To feel comfortable, conservatives seem to need to think the world is out to get them. [source]
i don’t WANT to feel people are out to get me. i want the people who are out to get me to go AWAY. if not that, i at least want people to be fair and civil in how they go about attacking my way of life.
i do hold the belief that america’s institutions of higher education are teeming with liberals. why? because it is true. no one can dispute this point. don’t even try. there is no question that liberals far outnumber conservatives in american academia. multiple studies found that about 90% of college professors voted either for gore or nader in 2000. in other words, 9 out of 10 voted for liberal candidates. contrast the university faculty vote with totals nationwide in 2000…you’ll remember that vote was about 50/50.
the national center for policy analysis reports the results of one survey:
Thursday, September 05, 2002
A recent survey issued by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the American Enterprise Institute reveals that the overwhelming majority of college professors are registered Democrats, and that they teach in disciplines where politics matters the most. It found that:
*More that 90 percent of professors who work in the arts and sciences departments at leading colleges and universities belong to either Democrat, Green or Working Class parties — with very few registered as either Republican or Libertarian.
another:
the Chronicle of Higher Education presented a survey of the political orientation of full-time faculty members for 2000-01. The findings: Forty-seven percent were “liberal or far left,” 34 percent were “middle of the road,” and 20 percent were “conservative” or “far right.” [source]
and walter williams writes
According to Karl Zinsmeister’s article “The Shame of America’s One-Party Campuses” in The American Enterprise (September 2002), campus political, and
hence ideological, diversity is all but absent. Mr. Zinsmeister sampled faculty political affiliation obtained from local voter registration records at several universities.
He classified faculty who registered as Democratic, Green or Working Families Party as members of the party of the Left and those registered as Republicans or Libertarians as members of the party of the Right.
The results were: Brown University, 5 percent of faculty were members of the party of the Right; at Cornell it was 3 percent; Harvard, 4 percent; Penn State, 17 percent; Stanford University, 11 percent; UCLA, 6 percent; and at UC Santa Barbara, 1 percent. There are other universities in the survey; however, the pattern is the same — a faculty dominated by leftist ideology. In some departments, such as Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Political Science, Sociology, History and English, the entire faculty is leftist. When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader. Zinsmeister concludes that one would find much greater political diversity at a grocery store or on a city bus.
So what does all this mean? It means your son or daughter will be taught that the Founders of United States were racists and sexists; capitalism is a tool used to oppress women and minorities; literature and philosophy written by “dead white men” is a tool of exploitation, one person’s vision of reality is just as valid as another’s, one set of cultural values (maybe the Taliban’s) is just as good as another, poverty is caused by rich people, and America is destroying the planet. [source]
indeed. if you’re liberal, you may not be happy with these incriminating facts, but you can rest easy knowing that america’s youth will be less likely to disagree with you once they’ve been brainwashed in the nation’s most prestigious universities.
visit these sites:
accuracy in academia
students for academic freedom
Liberal Party Registration at Selected Schools
School
% of Professors Registered to Parties of the Left
Brown University
94.7 percent
Cornell University
96.5 percent
Davidson College
90.9 percent
Denver College
97.2 percent
Harvard University
96.5 percent
Penn State University
85.5 percent
Pomona College
90.0 percent
San Diego State University
87.9 percent
Stanford University
89.9 percent
State U. of New York at Binghamton
97.2 percent
Syracuse University
96.2 percent
U.C. Berkeley
89.4 percent
U.C.L.A.
94.0 percent
U.C. San Diego
94.3 percent
U.C. Santa Barbara
98.6 percent
U. Colorado at Boulder
95.9 percent
U. of Houston
76.3 percent
U. of Maryland
85.5 percent
UNLV
91.0 percent
U. Texas at Austin
86.2 percent
or perhaps some hard numbers are more explicit:
Brown University - 54 on the left to 3 on the right.
Cornell University - 166 to 6
Harvard University - 50 to 2
Stanford University - 151 to 17
University of California at San Diego - 99 to 6
Syracuse University - 50 to 2
Most colleges have faculties that are composed of more than 80 percent registered Democrats, even though the number of registered Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. is roughly the same.
Faculty bias at UNLV, for example: Of the 78 professors who were registered with any party, there were 69 registered Democrats, 6 registered Republicans, 2 registered Greens, 1 registered Independent American, and 0 registered Libertarians. This compares to overall Clark County, NV voter registration, which is 43.7% Democrat and 37.2% Republican. [source]
9 Responses to “liberal academia”
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As a mathmatics studend at UC Santa Barbara, i find myself in a singularly good position to comment on this particular issue. I am shocked and dismayed, to say the least, at the overwhelming majority of liberal professors here at UCSB… I have to say that my own observations do come rahter sqarely with what has been said here.
However, not all the professors are left-wing politically. In fact, i am fortunate enough to be associated with the Math department, which has the highest concentration of Right-wing minds on the campus. It seems humorous, though unsurprising to me that the department of UCSB most founded on rational thought and intelligent deductive resoning has overwhelmingly chosen the conservative viewpoint on political issues.
That’s not to say the situation her politically is OK… it’s quite the opposite in fact. There are some departments, such as the Political Science department, and several of the more humanities-focused departments where you absolutely can not expect to get an education, much less graduate, if you are conservative politically. A friend of mine who was a Political Science major, was all but forced to switch majors, simpley because his advisor heard that he’d put up a ‘Bush/Cheney’ sticker in his window.
Apparently, anything can be tolerated down here, except for conservative politics. Personally, i find the whole situation intolerable.
And by the way, i know my spelling sucks. As i said, i am a math student, not an 8thgrader learning to spell. Before anyone criticizes me for it, ples focus on the issues i dicussed, not the letters i misplaced.
Amen and hallelujah! When I was going for my first bachelor’s degree (in history) during the late 1960’s, I witnessed at first hand the blind intolerance of leftist professors, who graded you according to how much you kissed up to them and parroted their drivel, but fortunately found a more congenial atmosphere while studying library science and years later, earning a second bachelor’s degree in business.
So…is there a correlation between college faculty and liberal political leanings because there’s a vast lefty academic conspiracy to squelch conservative thought, or because having more knowledge makes one more liberal?
I don’t know; I just know that a correlation is not a cause, and that the lefty academics I know can’t seem to put a committee meeting together, let alone a vast conspiracy.
Thanks for visiting my site. I’d be curious to know how you found it, since I don’t really post anywhere to advertise it, and don’t even post on it very often. I don’t think it’s Google searchable, either.
Thanks again.
Thanks for visiting the site!
Your site was linked from another blog…which one, I have no idea…
i dunno how larger departments handle things, but at the philosophy department at my school, a few senior members have control over hirings. that doesn’t require a vast conspiracy, just a few blokes with an unbending commitment to liberalism (which many academics have!).
but even if the process is more democratic at some schools, it doesn’t matter. there is a huge discrepancy in party affiliation at american universities, and people with strongly held political views will vote the party line generally. so, neither does this require a conspiracy. i think politics is it’s own, “built in” conspiracy.
as to the proposition that perhaps “having more knowledge makes one more liberal”…i’d have to say phooey. i spent some time thinking about the issues a few years ago, and found i fell in with conservatives. at the time, i thought, “ah, people who REALLY think about these things must come to the conservative conclusion.” but, obviously that is silly. i’ve realized that there are compelling arguments for both sides.
i wish someone could come up with a more convincing reason (than political blacklisting) for the discrepancy among professors, but i’m afraid there isn’t one.
how did it get this way then? i also have no idea.
Yep. I knew the “vast conspiracy” argument was a strawman when I posted it, but it hung together well.
College faculties, in the 1950s and 1960s, used to be as overwhelmingly conservative as they are now overwhelmingly liberal. I suspect what largely explains both skews is self-selection. Why does anyone choose the job he does? Of course there are practical matters like salary and benefits, and aptitude for the tasks involved, but there are social factors, too. I think that one will choose to work around people with whom one gets along whenever possible. This often means (especially in our increasingly politically-polarized age) people who share one’s own opinions on non-work related topics. (In any field, but especially academia, there are extremely bitter fights about work–as Henry Kissinger once said (quoting from memory–forgive errors), “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” But I digress.)
Anyhoo, if one is bright, gets good grades, and has a talent for, say, history, there are a number of things he could do. One is to earn an advanced degree in history and become a history professor. Another is to earn an advanced degree in history and work for a think tank. In both careers our history PhD would do the same sort of work. But if he went to work today in a university, he would largely be surrounded by liberals. Fine, if he’s a liberal or given to arguments with his coworkers; but what if he’s a conservative and he doesn’t want the stress of working with people with whom he disagrees? Well, then, he chooses to work at the think tank, or somewhere else.
Over time, the equilibrium might shift, as it did between the 1960s and today. I think that this is because the very sharpest scholars in a field earn their stripes by batting down the arguments of their intellectual progenitors. After a while, these clever rebels get publications, get tenure, get prestige, and get a bevy of followers. Their followers then take over the academy–by sheer force of numbers and socialization, not because they planned to do so–and the cycle repeats.
Unfortunately, I only have one such shift to base this on (n=1), so I don’t think this hypothesis would be publishable. Alas.
I also think that this is why political skewing at universities is less marked in the natural sciences. Natural scientists already largely share a philosophy–namely, that there are mechanistic causes for phenomena, and these can be studied using the scientific method. You believe in a flat tax and I believe in a progressive income tax? Fine, because we both believe in biological evolution. On the big issues, we agree enough to get along. In the natural sciences, a political conflict doesn’t mean a philosophic conflict, as it can in the social sciences and humanities.
The biggest disservice the current Republican leadership has done to themselves and perhaps the country is to portray all political conflicts as philosophic conflicts. This has driven a wedge between politically conservative natural scientists and the Republican party, and is threatening to skew university natural scientists to the left the way the humanities and social sciences are already skewed. But that’s a topic for another rant, and this one’s already too long.
If we were to survey the high management of our nation’s major corporations, I wonder if we would find that the majority of the people running these companies lean to the right? Perhaps the large numbers of leftist school teachers and professors indicates that people who are looking to further someone else’s education are leftist, while people looking to further their own gains are right-wing. That’s why the professors are all liberal; it’s not a right-wing policy to sacrifice one’s own goals to aid another’s future. Professors don’t make much money, while the average CEO makes more in one day than a worker in his factory makes a year. So of course a right-wing individual would not stay at a university when he has the opportunity for riches.
golly, i wonder this too! unfortunately, you base your entire ensuing argument on this flimsy, baseless, unresearched conclusion. not only are the raw facts of your claim highly questionable, but there are other issues behind them that you ignore just as foolishly. let’s assume, for purpose of this argument (and since you do) that most CEOs are right-wingers. did they become CEOs because they are conservative? or have they (allegedly) become conservative because of their unique perspective as heads of businesses?
i don’t know, and despite being so far out on a limb already, you continue to venture out further, with the following spewage of complete nonsense:
ah-HA! it’s so simple. republicans only want to further their own gains. liberals want “further someone else’s education”.
i am having a hard time envisioning you as someone older than about 9 or 10. did you know that when adults argue they sometimes try to back up their statements? give us SOMETHING!
obviously! well, after all those facts, purely devoid of conjecture, many must be thoroughly convinced of the truth of your position. thanks for your comment.