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"Sounds to me that Ithica discriminates based on political pursuasion"

I didn't see anywhere that Ithaca College asks applicants their political registration when applying for a position. Wouldn't the individuals party affiliation need to be known to the school to discriminate based on it.

This is at least the third discussion of this topic - how many registered Democrats/liberals are employed by Bechtel Corp. - do they discriminate? I personally don't think it appropriate to hire/not hire based on political persuasion.

Formally universities are not supposed to ask. But if you're a Ph.D candidate you can be sure your political preferences are known long before you apply for a position, and if you're deemed to be insufficiently Marxist or anti-American, you can forget about tenure. In a way the enemies of freedom have turned our institutions of higher education into a bastion to assault our free society. Its no accident to say the barbarians are right inside our ivory towers.

I didn't see anywhere that Ithaca College asks applicants their political registration when applying for a position. Wouldn't the individuals party affiliation need to be known to the school to discriminate based on it.

SS. Then how do YOU account for their one side political views?

It is obvious through their hiring procedure, they acheive nondiversity of political opinion and ideas.

It's true that there have been a number of threads on this story. Some of us feel that the issue of a lack of diversity of thought in academia is a serious problem. David Horowitz at Front Page is conducting a real crusade on the issue.

Each of the threads has added additional information that some have found interesting.

As for political affiliation being known, in New York State when people register to vote they have the option, which most exercise, to register with a political party. That information is a matter of public record, and is exactly how the authors of the study determined the affiliations of the IC professors.

In any case, the faculty hiring committee surely reviews the publications of any applicant, and quickly determines their political orientation.

One's politics are generally pretty obvious; in a highly politicized department they will come up in the job interview. A few years ago a favorite question was 'have you read the Bell Curve?'; correct asnwer "no", preferably combined with a barfing imitation.

A former colleague of mine did a similar study on the U. of Nebraska faculty; in a heavily republican state, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2:1 . When you broke it down by college it was even more interesting; most of the professional schools (except law) were about evenly divided or slightly republican; but Arts and Sciences and Fine Arts were 71% and 77% Democrat respectively; the remainder (IIRC) broke about evenly Republican and Independent. The reason why I, as a chemist, am campus faculty advisor to the College Republicans is that they can't find a Republican in Poli. Sci.

My friend, incidentally, made no secret of his politics here, and was denied tenure. He was hired by a smaller state college, stayed religiously out of politics, and was promoted to associate professor early. last year. Just before he came up for tenure, his colleagues found out he'd done the survey. Even though they'd voted to promote him just the previous year, they denied him tenure last year.

No conservative faculty member on campus will be surprised at the survey, and few will dispute that in many Departments, particularly the humanities, fine arts and social science, one's job may be jeopardized by being revealed to be a conservative republican. Fortunately, most hard scientists are quite apolitical.