Posted on 05/02/2018 11:56:09 AM PDT by DeweyCA
What would you say if I told you that the faculty at most colleges and universities, particularly the larger liberal arts schools, is predominantly composed of liberal Democrats? You might find that surprising if you happen to have been living under a rock for the past several decades but otherwise, this is pretty much a dog-bites-man story. But just how bad is the imbalance? Mitchell Langbert at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) recently finished a lengthy research project examining the question and has published the results. No matter how bad you think the level of liberal bias is at most schools, it’s probably worse.
In this article I offer new evidence about something readers of Academic Questions already know: The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.
My sample of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report consists of 5,197, or 59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis.1 If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.
The numbers which include the two military schools should be disregarded. Obviously, there’s going to be a significantly larger percentage of conservatives among those who answer the call to service. And how you define West Point or Annapolis as a “liberal arts school” is something of a mystery to begin with. But as for the rest of the schools, that’s a bigger gap than even I had imagined. Nearly eight out of ten of these colleges either have zero Republicans in their faculty or a number so small as to be statistically insignificant. And even the schools with a measurable number of Republicans still find them being vastly outnumbered.
Sadly, despite the broad swath of the country away from the coasts where conservative views are more dominant, this is one area where Republicans and conservatives have failed to make any inroads. And it’s not a trivial matter. It’s true that many people emerge from four years of college and 100% immersion in liberal doctrine with a decidedly leftward worldview, but later go on to slowly grow more conservative. This usually happens when they wind up having to begin paying their own bills (and taxes), are faced with raising children or try to purchase a home. But that process can take decades and obviously they don’t all make the journey.
Allowing nearly all of the schools to be conducting this sort of liberal indoctrination program and supporting an agenda where any opposing views are shouted down leaves us with one generation after another of young workers – and voters – who are still tilted in the direction of socialism. It’s a dangerous situation and flies in the face of what true education should be about. Spirited debate and exposure to both sides of each fundamental question would produce a more thoughtful generation of graduates. How we make any inroads in that area remains a mystery as long as the numbers are as horrid as Langbert found in his analysis.
A liberal arts degree will guarantee you a job as a recruiter for your alma mater (and nowhere else).
No loans or grants to liberal arts majors. Simple. Just STEM.
It is not necessarily the professors and the classroom instruction that wraps students with a blanket of Progressive world view. It is all the stuff on campus and as part of campus life outside and in between classes.
At orientation, the student hears one or two or three or four talks where inclusion and diversity is either a component of the talk or the main point of the talk.
From the dorm room to the class room, the student passes a bunch of flyers and announcements. Join the physics club. Join the Quidditch club. And several more promoting LGBTQXYZ and/or lamenting the oppression of LGBTQXYX. The left wing extra-curricular activity dominates the content of political interest, and nearly as much as the innocuous stuff.
College is where young people learn to watch Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, David Letterman, and whichever other leftist sleazeballs hold late night court on the entertainment channels.
The extraneous and expensive overhead offices of the university include the Dean of Race, Dean of Racism, Dean of Multiculture, Dean of Global Warming, Dean of LGBTQ, Dean of Green Earth, Dean of Non-Oppression, Dean of Multiculture Awareness, the Dean of Open and Affirming, the Dean of Inclusion & Diversity, or a variety of some such things.
And then there are the activist professors in the Humanities and Arts sections.
The sciences and math are considered liberal arts.
I think technology is already on the way to solving this problem as more and more classes are taken online. Currently, those classes are probably still administered by mostly liberals, but I think the amount of political influence they can exert on line is significantly diminished, in part by the impersonal nature of the instruction but also because those professors know that EVERYTHING they say and do gets recorded and archived.
Eventually, there will be teacher-less online classrooms, and I think that will become common place long before driver-less cars. Of course some professions don’t lend themselves to this kind of instruction, but that tends to be in fields like medicine or engineering, which tend to be more politically balanced then all the humanities.
I doubt anyone has looked at it yet but how can they remain accredited? If they ever were. It’s very like having a vast majority of your own graduates on the faculty. Very incentuois from outsiders. Hmmmmm . . .
Under the classical definitions then yes!
The seven liberal arts:
trivium—the verbal arts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric;
quadrivium—the numerical arts: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
quadrivium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium
Trivium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium
I went before a board to be granted my Masters Degree. I had a 3.9 on a 4 point grade scale. One of the members of the three member board did not want to award me the degree. This was for political reasons. People with common sense tailor their views in order to be successful. Being conservative is a career ender in most universities.
Unfortunately, going to a top-tier university is not just about the classes but about the contacts you make and the “club” that you join. Have you noticed how many high government officials are from a small number of universities. They hire and promote their own.
I wish that I could share your optimism about online education, but I don’t. I have seen liberal arts online courses where you HAVE TO give back the leftist answer that the professor is spouting or you will be given an “F.” When I checked the “ratemyprofessor.com” comments on these professors, other students said the same thing: give a leftist answer or get an “F”.
“...59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat.”
The other 40% are full-blown communists or anarchists, with maybe a couple of Greens and Libertarians thrown in for fun.
Here is the URL to the original study that is referenced in this article: https://www.nas.org/articles/homogenous_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal
I agree with your statements. It is the entire college environment, that is overwhelmingly liberal/leftist, that simply surrounds a student with only one acceptable point-of-view. At the same time, if the professors were more balanced, they could counter-act the social culture of the campus, by pointing out the pervading liberal groupthink. The professors are liberal/leftist and also too cowardly to stand up and demand that both sides be heard.
bookmark
Thanks for the tip
True, but I think, eventually, there’ll be an app for that - some kind of high tech social media platform providing online students with online clubs, frats, etc, with virtual reality meet-ups from people all over the world, along with the option for off-line live meetups of folks in your own region.
Potentially that technology will provide even greater networking opportunities, as students get exposed to a much wider population of online students and can make connections all over the world ... and it’ll likely be done on a centralized platform used by all the online schools, expanding that networking opportunity even further.
The driving forces behind this change will be two-fold:
1) A tech savvy young generation already immersed in social media and having an interest, and often even a preference, for being in that kind of environment.
2) Traditional brick and mortar college, weighed down by years of leftist economic policies resulting in staggering wage and pension costs, can never compete with the online schools. It’s like what happened to Toy’s R Us when they let Amazon get a foot in the door to do their shipping, because Amazon could do that so much cheaper. Eventually, the Toy’s R Us shoppers migrated over to the Amazon site entirely, since they could get all the same things they wanted there at a much better price. So that’s what will happen to the universities.
So I think colleges are heading down the same path, as they’re under pressure to offer more and more online offerings, and have to either drive those costs down or lose students to other online only schools that offer the same courses and degrees at much cheaper prices. Hence, the traditional schools will get their Toys R Us moment where the resulting revenue decline can no longer sustain their unavoidable institutional costs, and they’ll bite the dust.
STEM = science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Liberal arts ... “Academic disciplines, such as languages, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, and science, that provide information of general cultural concern: “The term ‘liberal arts’ connotes a certain elevation above utilitarian concerns. Yet liberal education is intensely useful” ( George F. Will).
You either know or you don’t.
Sure, there’s a process involved and as we’re at the early stages now, things like this will happen, at least until we get to the teacher-less classes. But still, look at the difference between that experience and being in the class, live, where not only do you have to give back the right answer, but you can’t even mutter any dissent under your breath.
For example, in the experience you just cited, yeah, you had to give back the answer the leftist instructor expected, but minutes later you got to vent your disgust over this with like minded students. And as an act of defiance you could still take the course wearing a MAGA hat (and maybe nothing else) while you take the class, and the teacher would never know. So those are brainwashing cures you can’t really get in the traditional university experience.
Students in an online course are NOT able to complain to other students in the same course about a professor’s indoctrination efforts. Their only contact with other students in the course is through the online monitored group conversations. A conservative student is going to be VERY reluctant to share his disagreements about the prof’s view if he thinks that it could affect his grade. Maybe your experience is different from mine, but that is the environment that I have seen in online courses.
I just finished an online JD. I am guessing that the political leanings of the faculty and students both broke near enough to 50/50. Former Dean was conservative. My admin law and ADR prof was a leftist. I first learned legal writing from one of Nader’s Raiders. The advanced writing guy was pretty much apolitical. It was wonderful! Diversity of thought like you’ll never see in so many schools.
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