College campuses are decidedly liberal. We really don’t need an official “study” to tell us that, but we have one.
It’s probably worse than you thought. Almost 40 percent of the colleges included in the study had no Republican professors.
ZERO. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Using a sample of 51 top-ranked liberal arts colleges, the study looked at 8,688 full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors and found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 10.4:1, or around 10 Democrat professors for every one professor registered as a Republican.
If the military colleges West Point and Annapolis are removed from the sample, that ratio widens even further: nearly 13 Democrats for each Republican professor.
Who’s actually shocked by this ratio?
The study adds a little more context:
Political homogeneity is problematic because it biases research and teaching and reduces academic credibility. In a recent book on social psychology, The Politics of Social Psychology edited by Jarret T. Crawford and Lee Jussim, Mark J. Brandt and Anna Katarina Spälti, show that because of left-wing bias, psychologists are far more likely to study the character and evolution of individuals on the Right than individuals on the Left.2 Inevitably affecting the quality of this research, though, George Yancey found that sociologists prefer not to work with fundamentalists, evangelicals, National Rifle Association members, and Republicans.3 Even though more Americans are conservative than liberal, academic psychologists’ biases cause them to believe that conservatism is deviant. In the study of gender, Charlotta Stern finds that the ideological presumptions in sociology prevent any but the no-differences-between-genders assumptions of left-leaning sociologists from making serious research inroads. So pervasive is the lack of balance in academia that more than 1,000 professors and graduate students have started Heterodox Academy, an organization committed to increasing “viewpoint diversity” in higher education.4 The end result is that objective science becomes problematic, and where research is problematic, teaching is more so.
It’s ridiculously problematic. It was bad enough a few years ago. That was pre-safe space days, too. (Ugh. I bet my alma mater totally has a safe space now.)
More from the study:
A few liberal arts colleges are outliers and do not conform to the standard liberal slant. One, Thomas Aquinas, has thirty-three full-time faculty and all are Republican. The two military colleges in my sample, West Point and Annapolis, have D:R ratios of 1.3:1 and 2.3:1. Although it is debatable whether military colleges are liberal arts colleges, U.S. News’s inclusion of them in the liberal arts category is fortuitous because they offer evidence that when colleges provide supportive environments, intellectual diversity is achievable. There are other exceptions, such as Claremont McKenna, which adopted a viewpoint diversity strategy early in its history, and Kenyon, which is one of a few of the top-ranked liberal arts colleges located in a predominantly Republican state and which did not become coed until 1969.
Thomas Aquinas and St. John’s, another college with above average Republican representation, have emphasized interdisciplinary teaching and downplayed the publish or perish imperative, which Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern have argued contributes to left-oriented groupthink.5 The exceptions to the Democratic-only rule indicate that institutional factors and discrimination might be key reasons for political homogeneity in the liberal arts colleges.
Look at this chart. It shows the number of Democratic faculty members for every Republican in certain academic fields.
Look at the communications field. That’s what we’re up against. And we wonder why MSM is so biased.
h/t The Blaze