Liberal Professors Outnumber Conservative Faculty 5 to 1. Academics
Explain Why This Matters, by Natalie Johnson / @nataliejohnsonn / January 14, 2016
Professors
in higher education have become notably more liberal during the past 25 years,
according to a recent study, and academics predict that the trend isn’t likely
to slow any time soon.
During
the past quarter-century, academia has seen a nearly 20-percent jump in
the number of professors who identify as liberal. That increase has created a
lopsided ideological spread in higher education, with liberal professors now
outpacing their conservative counterparts by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1.
In
2014, 60 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far
left,” according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, as reported by The Washington Post’s
“Wonkblog.”
Compare
that with 1990 survey data, when only 42 percent said the same.
While
academia has shifted dramatically to the left, professors on the right have
dropped off. The number of professors who identified as “conservative” and “far
right” during the same time span fell by nearly 6 percent, while the number of
“moderate” academics dropped by 13 percentage points.
Matthew
Woessner, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Penn
State Harrisburg, studies political trends in higher education and
advocates increased diversity of viewpoints with a group of academics who call
themselves Heterodox Academy.
Woessner,
who says he is a conservative Republican, said the study raises important
questions on whether the liberal tilt that has persisted in higher
education is becoming more pronounced, and if so, what impact that has on the
national political discourse.
Daniel
Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, said the reported
5-to-1 ratio is “not very meaningful” because the terms “liberal”
and “conservative” have become “exceedingly troubled.”
Instead,
Klein predicted that the imbalance between faculty who vote Democratic
compared with those who vote Republican is closer to 9 to 1 or even 10 to 1. Either
way, as professors have become more liberal, they’ve shifted far to the left of
the general public and their students, Woessner told The Daily Signal.
A
Gallup poll released earlier this month found that 38
percent of Americans identify as conservative, versus 24 percent who identify
as liberal. And
while the study by the Higher Education Research Institute reported that
liberal students outpace conservative students by nearly 10 percent, roughly
half identify as moderate. This has created a wide ideological gap between
professors and students.
Graphics: The Washington Post. Used with
permission of Christopher Ingraham, Wonkblog.
In
2014, college professors were roughly 30 percentage points more likely to
identify as liberal, than were college freshmen. Compare that to the 1990
findings, when professors were 16 percentage points more likely to label
themselves as liberal than were their freshmen students.
Woessner
said: This raises critical questions of whether students are getting a balanced
education—not because there’s some conspiracy to block out conservative ideas,
but merely because the people who are teaching are either not familiar with or
don’t embrace conservative ideas.
Even
when faculty attempt to present an issue in a balanced and impartial manner,
he said, personal biases naturally bleed into material.
According
to 2009 data from the Higher Education Research Institute, the number of
students who said their political views were “liberal” or “far left” jumped 9.2
percentage points from freshman to senior year.
Carson
Holloway, an associate professor of political science at the University of
Nebraska Omaha, said the imbalance is most notable in the humanities and social
science fields, where the battle of ideas is most important.
Holloway,
who also chairs the Council of Academic Advisers at The Heritage Foundation,
said the average political scientist in the U.S. is a “mainstream” liberal.
The
problem with this, he said, is that a lot of “impressive” thought stemming from
Europe fostered conservative ideology, but because not many in the academy
represent that tradition, students get a skewed view.
“They
might tend to think that conservatism is not an intellectual tradition because
they don’t see any professors who hold to it, so there’s a distortion that
emerges there,” Holloway told The Daily Signal.
Woessner
said the students who are harmed the most by the bias in academia are the
liberal ones:
Conservatives
benefit from having liberal ideas to expand their horizons and challenge their
thinking, but ideologically liberal students get their ideas reinforced. This
means they’re not growing intellectually because they don’t have the exposure
to other ideas to make them think.
Woessner
said an equal number of liberal and conservative professors isn’t
necessary for higher education to work well, but at least a small minority of
faculty on campus should hold different views.
Conservatives
who want to become involved in higher education face challenges, he said, and
universities should encourage more right-leaning academics to become
professors to help shrink the ideological gap.
“The
goal should not be an even split, because that’s probably impossible, but to
create a space for enough conservative ideas that students are exposed at least
nominally to these other perspectives,” Woessner said.
And
although a prescriptive fix to obtain greater balance won’t happen on its
own, Klein said, “donors, students and parents should vote with their dollars,
and voters should vote with their votes against pouring taxpayer money into a
leftist apparatus.”
Natalie
Johnson is a news reporter for The Daily Signal and graduate of The Heritage
Foundation's Young Leaders Program.
Comments
When the
American Communist Party published its 45 goals in 1920, conservatives took
notice. Marxist leaning academics began
to appear in the Sociology Departments first and spread to the other “Arts”
departments”. Economics was dominated by
Keynesian with a few good Austrians fighting for free markets. The Science
Departments like Physics, Chemistry and Math were not infiltrated. Engineering Schools remained conservative
along with Church owned colleges.
In the
1960s, “Liberation Theology” was on the rise and was evident in Church owned
colleges, I attended Jesuit owned St. Louis University from 1961 to 1965 and
saw this first hand, but it was limited. I was training to be a Personnel
Director in manufacturing companies, so I needed lots of science and math to
understand the equipment and processes. I also needed to know what the best
Consultants were telling the Fortune 500.
I got everything I needed.
From the
1960s to the 1990s education was steadily dumbed down while campuses and school
systems spent trillions on building palaces.
From the
1990s to present, the appearance of politically correct but occupationally
questionable majors were created, further dumbing down education at the college
level. The Biology Departments spawned Environmental Departments and federal
grants increased sharply. This made science “political”. Whoever paid for the research got whatever
answer they wanted. Very few college
graduates are getting what they need.
The
problem in these universities continues to be open hostility by Liberal faculty
toward Conservatives applying for faculty positions. Liberal Political correctness has destroyed
the true meaning of academic freedom.
“The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're
ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.“ -------------Ronald
Reagan
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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