Replies

The One-Party Campus
By Karl Zinsmeister

In most sectors of American life – corporations, non-profits, government agencies, churches, unions, voluntary organizations, the military, you name it – you will find ample numbers of both conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, people of the Right and people of the Left.

There is one important place, however, where this basic parity doesn’t hold, where the Right//Left balance is grossly skewed: among the ranks of faculty at colleges and universities.

Today’s colleges and universities are not, to use the current buzzword, “diverse” places. Quite the opposite: They are virtual one-party states, ideological monopolies, badly unbalanced ecosystems. They are utterly flightless birds with only one wing to flap. They do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America.

The graphs that follow document the harsh ideological imbalances that exist on virtually all college campuses today. These results were painstakingly tabulated for us (in several cases with help from the Center for the Study of Popular Culture) by student volunteers who visited the Board of Elections in the local jurisdiction where each college or university is located. Public voter registration records were cross-referenced with faculty rosters, and the findings were compiled.

Some professors could not be located in voter registers, a certain number were not registered in any party, and a few were registered to a party that could not be classified ideologically. But a great many had signed themselves up as members of an ideologically identifiable political faction.

Those who registered themselves in either the Democratic, Green, or Working Families Party we classified as members of a party of the Left – they are coded “L” in red in the results below.

Those registered in either the Republican or Libertarian Party we classified as members of a party of the Right – they are coded “R” in blue in the results below.

Lest critics accuse us of cherry-picking only fringed disciplines, we have stuck mostly to major, uncontroversial, and socially significant fields of study. And we have carefully arrayed the data by department. (Exact titles of departments vary by school; we have standardized to the most common terminology).

Colleges like to characterize themselves as wide-open places where every thought can be thought, where any opinion can be held, where all ideals and principles may be pursued freely. The demonstrable reality, however, is that you will find a much wider – and freer – cross-section of human reasoning and conviction in the aisles of any grocery store or city bus.

In truth, colleges are now hostile environments for economic and cultural conservatives. Only a comparatively narrow spectrum of views is really welcome on campus. If you stray from the liberal consensus you will soon find yourself without allies, without tenure, and eventually without a position.

Don’t take our word for it; consult the data on the following pages – they speak for themselves.