Mitchell Langbert, Anthony Quain, and Daniel B. Klein recently published an outstanding study on faculty political orientations. They used a unique dataset that contains information on voter registration roles. Their study examined data from the top 40 US universities that contained over 7,243 professors.
Overall, they found:
It's worth remembering that democrats are about 30% of the American population, while independents constitute about 40% and republicans about 30%. Mathmatically, this means that university professors come from a relatively small and entirely unrepresentative segment of the American political spectrum. How this happens is a matter of speculation but the consequences are not. University faculty, especially in the humanities and many of the social sciences, share little by way of background, values, or orientations with the average American. They share almost nothing with individuals on the right side of the political spectrum, who are the only true minority left on most campuses.
Once again, there is more intellectual diversity in churches and amongst the priesthood than on our campuses.
You can dowload the study below:
Overall, they found:
- An average D:R ratio of 11.5 to 1;
- Substantial variation across universities and across academic fields;
- In the social sciences and humanities there were more professors registered to 3rd parties (e.g. Green Party) than were registered republican;
- In economics, 4.5 to 1,
- History 33.5 to 1,
- Journalism 20 to 1,
- Law 8.6 to 1,
- Psychology 17 to 1;
- Many departments didn't have a single republican;
It's worth remembering that democrats are about 30% of the American population, while independents constitute about 40% and republicans about 30%. Mathmatically, this means that university professors come from a relatively small and entirely unrepresentative segment of the American political spectrum. How this happens is a matter of speculation but the consequences are not. University faculty, especially in the humanities and many of the social sciences, share little by way of background, values, or orientations with the average American. They share almost nothing with individuals on the right side of the political spectrum, who are the only true minority left on most campuses.
Once again, there is more intellectual diversity in churches and amongst the priesthood than on our campuses.
You can dowload the study below:
| langbertquainkleinsept2016.pdf |
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