The number of liberal professors is decreasing, but only slightly, while the number of centrists is increasing. A study reported in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly looked at the political affiliations of professors and how they stood on different opinions based on surveys conducted in 1989 and 1997. In that time, the liberal persuasion dropped from 24.6 percent to 23.3 percent. "Middle of the road" professors increased from 16.5 percent to 19.6 percent of professors. The remaining professors in 1997 were listed as 32.6 percent moderately liberal, 17.7 percent moderately conservative, and 6.7 percent conservative. So conservatives are still far outnumbered.
Posted by Angie Holladay
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42 Comments
“Middle of the road”, is that another term for “Unaffiliated”?It should not be of any surprise to see a decrease in the main two parties.
Keeeriste:
go back to journalsim schoo.
College professors are more well-educated, and they think things through.
Of course, they’re liberal.
Thinking things through doesn’t make one a liberal. If anything it makes them thoughtful independents and more likely to be centrists. Probably more compassionate conservatives than any one in either party could hope to be.
The University is an ivory tower, it will always be more liberal (that is not a criticism, just a reality; to a certain extent, it SHOULD be an ivory tower). It caters to the young and is a refuge for those who, in a sense, never left the security of the University. The professor, in many parts of the university, is the classic professional student, perpetually surrounded by the young.
Just remember the old truism (from Churchill, I think, among others): If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.
That would be the Churchill who was unceremoniously dumped as Prime Minister after WW2 . . .
Capn (AKA ProudLib, etc.):
That’s the one. And just why does that matter? Politics, and the public, are fickle.
A comment written by a Republican, conservative professor at what is generally recognized as a politically liberal college (attended by daughter number 2) which I feel is instructive:
http://www.colby.edu/colby.mag/issues/current/articles.php?issueid=35&articleid=525&dept=fromthehill
Interesting, Vaughn.
But the conservative professor essentially admits that conservatives go into other fields.
Why is that?
The money.
So they get what they’re after, don’t they.
College professors typically live in a world that weaves theory with fantasy. Liberalism generally looks good on paper – but fails miserably in practicality.
Take Norway for instance. One of the most liberal countries on the planet.
Ranked number one in health care, number one in standard of living, number one in wealth equality, and number one in happiness.
Yup, you’re right, GolfBag, miserable failure.
This study has the horrid truth in graphical form for easy comparison. Scroll down to page 12 where charts start.
http://www.ratio.se/pdf/wp/dk_aw_voter.pdf
And it is the same if not more so at other elite universities such as the Columbias, Princetons, Harvard etc. Their search teams essentially prohibit anyone other than the usual leftists from even being considered for positions. Anyone that is not a leftist and does not have tenure has to STFU or be removed until they can sneak in under the tenure wire.
This is where the horrible pseudo “social policies” are generated then foistered and tested on the public. Such nonsense as “new math”, “outcome based anything”, “social justice” other leftist crank crapshoots etc.
Just talked with a fellow that has to work with a lot of under 30 year olds, they have been taught that Truman and McCarthur were war criminals and that the fools that participated in the Normandy landing and the Battle of the Bulge were just that…fools. So investigate before you send your kids to some of these re-education camps.
mrbill,
In response to your right wing conspiracy theory and total ignorance of how academia works, here is Juan Cole taking down George Will on this very question.
*********************************
Sunday, November 28, 2004Shock of the Week: Liberals in Liberal Arts
George Will’s column this week is unusually unreflective. I don’t often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is “only a theory” (a theory is a robust explanation well grounded in the evidence); and he knows that the Iraq war has been a disaster from beginning to end.
So it is surprising to see him parroting the ridiculous and pernicious line about major universities having few political conservatives in them.
There are all sorts of social-science problems with this allegation. First, what is the population that is being studied? Is it all tenure-track teachers in all universities in all schools and departments? Are we including two-year colleges? Four-year ones? Are we including Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools, Engineering schools?
If that were the pool, then academics probably mirror the general American society pretty closely. There are about 1.1 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools everywhere are. So it simply is not true that “universities” are bastions of the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe.
If what is being alleged is that the professors of History, English, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. at the top 25 universities in the US are disproportionately liberals, then that also raises questions. What is a “liberal?” If he means they vote Democrat, then so did, until recently, Zell Miller. And, what does it even mean to be a “liberal” in your study of Milton or of the French Revolution?
Then comes the question of “why”? If that is the question, it should be studied. The rightwing “think tanks” have not studied the question, and have only polemicized about these poorly constructed “studies.” (These are the same people who assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was 2-5 years from having a nuclear bomb.) In this instance, George Will jumps to conclusions about why.
I have been in a major history department for 20 years, and have served on innumerable search committees, in my own department and in other units on campus. I have never, ever, even once, heard any search committee member broach the political party affiliation of a candidate for a position, and there has never been any way to even know such a thing from the materials submitted. Hiring is done at the grass roots level in academic departments. The department appoints a search committee. The committee solicits manuscripts, reads widely, and decides on 10. Then it narrows those to 2-3 for a campus visit. Those finalists come and give a talk. If they seem less coherent or less able to engage with hard questions than their writing had suggested, then they are dropped. The question is always, “is this an interesting mind?” “Is this person’s methodology sound?” “Has this person mastered the relevant literature (i.e. has read the other articles and books on the subject)?” The manuscripts are read by the search committee, by the Department executive committee, by the faculty at large, by the School’s executive committee and deans, by the divisional committee (e.g. social sciences or humanities).
There would be no way to stack this process politically. The school executive committee is elected at large from all school departments; ours often has economists or biologists on it. The divisional committee often has political scientists. A substandard historian being hired only because he was a leftist would never get through this gauntlet. Each search committee is ad hoc, staffed according to field, and each differs in composition from the others. All the other committees are constantly rotating personnel, by election. There is no possibility of a centralized cabal that could appoint people of only one political coloration. In fact, David Horowitz wants to find a way to use state legislatures and congress to corrupt this grassroots and professional process by politicizing it and focusing on political outcome rather than academic achievement.
So if it were true that we don’t have many conservatives in the department, which I could not verify because it is a department of over 70 persons and I don’t know the politics of most of them, then how could that be explained?
That certain professions at certain points in time, skew politically, is demonstrable. For instance, back in the Eisenhower era, the US officer corps was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Now, only 10 percent of US officers identify themselves as Democrats (a really worrying development). Yet the salaries of the officer corps is probably disproportionately provided by the blue states. Why should this have happened to the officer corps? Should Congress legislate political balance in the upper ranks of the US armed forces?
In immigration studies, there are “push” and “pull” factors. Some people emigrate because of war or poor economies. Some people are perfectly well off but emigrate for even greater opportunities. The former is a push factor. The latter is a pull factor.
The most logical explanation for any political bias in some parts of the professoriate in my view is that the sort of persons with the skills to be in a major academic liberal arts department could also be successful in business, lobbying, law, advertising and other well-paying professions. And it is the corporate world and its lobbying appendages that have the marked bias, to the Right. Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn’t be comfortable in such a position. (All think tanks hire explicitly by ideology, and 17 of the 19 most influential ones in Washington are deliberately staffed by conservatives, but that doesn’t bother Will.)
Exhibit A is William J. Bennet. Bennett has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Texas. If he had been a man of the left, he would be teaching that subject at some small liberal arts college for $70,000 a year. Because he was on the Right, he had an entree to the Reagan administration, and rose to become Secretary of Education and then drug czar.
The vast opportunities open to an intellectual on the Right can be seen in Bennett’s career. It is often forgotten that he deserted public service as drug czar after only about a year, leaving all of his commitments unfulfilled. He was able to land at Joe Coors’s and Richard Mellon Scaife’s so-called American Heritage Foundation. Bennett’s opportunities were so many and so lucrative that the hard work of public service, and the ethics rules requiring careful reporting of income, seemed increasingly unappealing. The opportunities are so enormous, if one is willing to oppose affirmative action and support increasing inequality of wealth and bash unions, that it is even hard to keep such persons in high-profile, remunerative public service positions on the Right. They are sucked out of them by the corporate vacuum cleaner.
The next time we meet Bennett, he has somehow made so much money that he can drop $6 million in Las Vegas casinos in a single year (he says he won as much as he lost, which, if true, means he probably cheats). This level of gambling makes him a “whale” in casino terms, given all sorts of perquisites. That is a very different life than teaching in a small liberal arts college, having spent one’s youth making in the $20,000s and $30,000s a year (that would have been true of Bennett’s generation of academics). And the price of admission to all those riches? Say things like that “homosexuals” have an average lifespan of 42 years, or public education should be privatized, and blame poor people for being poor because they are lazy and immoral and gamble too much.
So, Mr. Will, it is the “pull” factor that explains your conundrum. Liberal academics aren’t viciously excluding conservative intellectuals who apply to teach hundreds of students a week for $45,000 a year (nowaday’s entry-level salary at a good liberal arts college), after they paid $100,000 for a Ph.D. in English literature from a top-rate university and spent 8 or 9 years beyond the BA toiling away as graduate students on tiny stipends. Conservative intellectuals don’t have to put up with that kind of thing (that is how they think of the privilege of teaching). They have other opportunities. They can be whales, and can pontificate on morality to the great unwashed.
As for Will’s argument that academia “has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.” Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations — except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. ” — it is another instance of blaming the victim.
Academia has not marginalized itself. It has been marginalized. Perfectly reasonable beliefs such as that workers should have a right to explore unionizing without fear of being fired have been redefined by Joe Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife as “out of the mainstream.” Thinking that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq (as I said repeatedly in 2002 and early in 2003, even as I admitted Saddam’s atrocities) was defined as out of the mainstream and unpatriotic. Corporate media bring in a parade of so-called “experts” (often lacking credentials and saying ridiculous things) from “think tanks,” in Washington and New York instead of letting academics speak. (There are some exceptions, obviously, but I am talking about over-all numbers). Wouldn’t you like to hear about Ayman al-Zawahiri from someone who actually had read him in Arabic? The universities have such experts. The think tanks mostly just have smelly little orthodoxies of the Right.”
Hey mrbill,Just present the kids with both theories about Truman and McArthur, and let them make up their own minds.
Yup, it’s the money. It’s ALWAYS the money.
The other problem that Cole doesn’t mention is that conservatives tend to be conservatives first and everything else second, while liberals are the other way around.
If you’re a conservative first and a historian second, you don’t go far in academia because they want the evidence to support the conclusion, not a foregone conclusion backed by whatever straws can be grabbed.
Even Milton Friedman is looking less and less like an economist these days and more like what he was–an ideologue.
LOL! Jed!
Touche, dude . . . touche.
Does it matter why professors are liberal? Who cares why, they are, and it needs to be pointed out. Liberals have been entrenched for some time and the culture of academia is such that change can be very difficult to make. I don’t know if there is much of anything that can be done about it.
Hopefully the status quo will naturally change in response to the demands of the students for more balance.
outlander,
And by the same token, would I be right to assume that you believe the officer corps of the United States Armed forces needs to include more liberals for reasons of ‘balance’?
Nope I don’t CF, but I’m thinking that the ACLU heirarchy could use a little balance. That’s just as applicable to the point.
outlander,
Disanalogy: the U.S. Military is funded by federal taxes, much of the system of higher education by state taxes. The ACLU receives neither.
And if you support ideological ‘balance’ in higher education but not in military leadership, why not?
Outlander–
Have you even been on a college campus lately?
Most students don’t seem to know or care about the difference between a liberal or a conservative.
You couldn’t find one in 100 undergraduates who knows who David Horowitz or Noam Chomsky is.
Students these days are incapable of organizing for more ice cream at lunch let alone for political ends.
“number one in wealth equality, and number one in happiness”. Interesting use of words, CapnAmerica! Smacks of socialism. Number one in happiness? Is that because mind-altering drugs are legal in Norway? You forgot a couple of key metrics. GDP? CPI? Tax burden? Only liberals are happy when they are given benefits they don’t earn. The victim, you-owe-me, something-for-nothing mentality might be your definition of Camelot, but it is not what I would call happiness!
You will note, CF that the sum total of my POA to address this imbalance was doing nothing. That is what I think should be done in the military as well.
I can see where you are going with your question and will opt not to go down that path. I would comment though that it is a different matter when we are talking about civilian students vs military men and women. The miltary culture is the way it is for good reason.
Win1–
1. “Happiness” is based on perceived happiness in response to survey results.
2. What about the GDP and CPI and tax burden? Why don’t you make a case instead of just mentioning them as if bringing up the topic wins the debate?
3. Liberalism has nothing to do with being given benefits people haven’t earned. It has to do with the government allocating resources in ways that actually benefit people. Right now, 50 percent of our tax money goes to fund our military, but even that isn’t enough, because the war in Iraq is “off the books.”
Out of all that tax money, 40 percent of goes to “private contractors” who become stinking filthy rich by feeding at the public trough. It’s welfare for the rich.
Countries like Norway don’t budget 50 percent of the taxes to the military, and so they have more to spend on actual people as opposed to Dick Cheney (made 36 million dollars in 2000) and Halliburton.
“Most students don’t seem to know or care about the difference between a liberal or a conservative.”
If that is so, what piece of trash campuses have you been on lately? That’s not what I’ve seen…
Oh, well . . . that proves it then.
Thanks for the blazing insight.
On second thought, you just leave me . . . annoyed, Annoyed.
Most of the nation’s total government benefits go to persons in the middle or upper classes, with only 14% of total government benefits going to the poor. Cash assistance payments account for just over 1% of all federal benefits programs.
1% of your tax dollar–or 1 cent of every dollar paid as tax. Compare that to the 50% or 50 cents going to defense. Yes, defense is important, but if anything is taking your money and causing a hardship, it isn’t cash assistance/welfare. WWJD?
ElCapitan,You mean liberal countries like Denmark in which 50% of the average workin man’s salary goes to taxes?
Yeah, what progress?
CapnGalahad,
Can you think of any OTHER reason why Denmark and Norway are happy prosperous NATIONS? You think that just maybe it is because they are not cursed with tens of millions of racially destructive, criminal and economically useless non-Whites? Of course, I am sure that it never crossed your little myopic, closed leftist “mind”!
Viva La Revolucion Blanco!!!
Norway may as well be the only oil rich country that actually use the profit for the betterment of the society as a whole, and some more around the globe. Those conservative Saudis should take notes on truly educating their youngs, instead of wasting the money in casinos along the Riviera.
Political shill professors are nothing new. They are only taken seriously by students who ardently share the same views. Most students just parrot what the professor says (politically) just so they can make the grade. After all, the whole point of a college education is making the grade. The overwhelming majority of college students -even those who are affiliated with political action groups on campus- are just showboating so they can make “nice” with their professors in the hopes of attaining that coveted 4.0! That has been personal experience on the matter. So does it matter whether or not liberal profs outnumber conservative profs to us students who are there just to make the grade? It makes absolutely no difference. Because when all is said and done, we’re still gonna go back to driving SUVs polluting the planet, making racist inside jokes about people among our close circle of friends, in other words, returning to the comfortable little niche of being a typical red-blooded American 20 something.
Piss on politics, and piss on anyone who thinks that our generation gives a shit about the Left or the Right. What we are concerned about most is Number One.
And THAT is da TRUTH WITH A BAG OF CHIPS, people!!!
Will,
Ignorant, smug, and complacent is no way to go through life, son.
Your professors must be so proud.
Capn,Excuse me if I didn’t make my comen’t clear enough. What I meant was that I was curious where you had experienced this lack of interest amongst college students for politics. I’ve had plenty of experience with college students and politics having just graduated from college myself and I haven’t seen those same results. I’ve found many college students who are quite passionate about politics and everything that goes with politics.
Cap’n, while I have no personal experience, judging from Daughter #2’s comments, and the college web site, I venture there are at least some campuses with very involved students with respect to politics.
CF,It must be mighty interesting with your head in the clouds. The thick of it is my generation is more concerned about American Idol then the state of the nation. Feel free to come back down to earth after your attempts at political indoctrination, pops!
Will,
I didn’t say you were factually mistaken. You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know. I’ve taught at the university level since 1996, at four different universities.
More to the point, I’ve seen plenty of students, from all points on the ideological spectrum, exhibit an active interest in politics and society. The majority? Nope. But even the decision to politically abstain is, itself, a political decision that conveys some meaning.
Put it another way: if you’re right, I’d reinterpret what you proudly declare to be your generation’s indifference as the desire for a non-trivial politics that really does matter. And whenever I push a little bit on students, I always find the same feeling of having been betrayed, and the naive desire for a politics that means something. Deprived of this, what satisfactions are left them but to pursue material gain?
Your diagnosis, Will, falls far short of identifying what you see as your generation’s political malaise. You may want to go back to school, and try to learn how to interpret what you see.
Will–
50 percent of the average workingman’s salary goes to taxes . . .
1. you got a link for that?
2. how much higher is that than here, do you think, when you figure in Social Security tax (13 percent) and Medicare (4 ? percent) and property taxes (at least 100 a month in Wichita) and car tags and sales tax etc. etc.
As for my observation that college students seem politically apathetic, I regret saying it.
I still believe it, but it’s not a provable or even measurable statement one way or the other.
It’s like saying “America is the best country on earth.” It’s an unknown “fact.”
Cap’n, I think the level of political involvement is very dependent upon: 1) the campus in question; and 2) the major of the student.
As to the percentages for Social Security, the % withheld from the employee’s check is 6.2% FICA, and 1.45% for Medicare. The employer, of course, matches these. Also, to the extent it’s relevant, the 6.2% is collected up to a certain ceiling, which is in the $90,000 area (I’m too lazy to look it up), and the 1.45% Medicare tax is imposed without limit on salary.
Not many university professors will identify themselves as conservative. I don’t know of any that would, especially if conservative is associated as being a religious conservative, which almost no faculty are. That certainly doesn’t mean you can label someone as liberal. Being an empiricist should be independent of political labels.
I downloaded and read through the Journal of Public Opinion Quarterly article. If the survey had been sent to me, which it wasn’t since I received my Ph.D. in 1998, I wouldn’t have responded since it just addresses the political viewpoint as one-dimensional, from left to right. In short, the survey is very misspecified.
In reality, most of us understand political viewpoints are not one-dimensional. An individual might have a very different outlook on the economic freedom versus personal/social freedom issues. Like most that are on the business school faculty, I rate high on the economic freedom dimension, and somewhat high on personal freedom. I’m neither a conventional liberal or conservative. I could not have possibly responded to the survey that is cited here by Angie Holladay.
I’ve interviewed for a lot of faculty positions and have been on several campus visits. Most of the interview concerns research interests, with some interest, of course, in teaching. There’s no mention of anything political in any of this process. In sharp contrast to what many outside of academia would think, there’s precious little discussion of anything relating to politics or political views among faculty. Concerning research, there is great discussion, and we also discuss our classes.
I echo the comments of the Prof. A sheep follows the flock, but a discerning person formulates his own beliefs based on his values and his experiences. To subscribe entirely to one viewpoint, or see the world from just one side of the fence, greatly narrows intellectual growth. I could be considered a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, but those labels do not entirely define my beliefs in either category. Being a masters student and interacting with both grads and undergrads, today’s college students understand the dangers of being entirely liberal or conservative. The answers to most questions, as they say, lies somewhere in the middle. The world could learn a great deal from the younger perspectives of Annoyed and others.