Liberal Professors Outnumber Conservative Faculty 5 to 1.
January 17, 2016
By Paul Homewood
http://dailysignal.com/2016/01/14/liberal-professors-outnumber-conservative-faculty-5-to-1-academics-explain-why-this-matters/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=saturday&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRovvqvBZKXonjHpfsX56uorUaKxlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4ASMdhM6%2BTFAwTG5toziV8R7jHKM1t0sEQWBHm
Universities have for a number of years been hotbeds of left wing agitation, but a survey finds that left wing bias has grown even worse in recent years, as the Daily Signal reveals:
Professors in higher education have become notably more liberal during the past 25 years, according to a recent study, and academics predict that the trend isn’t likely to slow any time soon.
During the past quarter-century, academia has seen a nearly 20-percent jump in the number of professors who identify as liberal. That increase has created a lopsided ideological spread in higher education, with liberal professors now outpacing their conservative counterparts by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1.
In 2014, 60 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far left,” according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, as reported by The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog.”
Compare that with 1990 survey data, when only 42 percent said the same.
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While academia has shifted dramatically to the left, professors on the right have dropped off.
The number of professors who identified as “conservative” and “far right” during the same time span fell by nearly 6 percent, while the number of “moderate” academics dropped by 13 percentage points.
Matthew Woessner, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Penn State Harrisburg, studies political trends in higher education and advocates increased diversity of viewpoints with a group of academics who call themselves Heterodox Academy.
Woessner, who says he is a conservative Republican, said the study raises important questions on whether the liberal tilt that has persisted in higher education is becoming more pronounced, and if so, what impact that has on the national political discourse.
Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, said the reported 5-to-1 ratio is “not very meaningful” because the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have become “exceedingly troubled.”
Instead, Klein predicted that the imbalance between faculty who vote Democratic compared with those who vote Republican is closer to 9 to 1 or even 10 to 1.
Either way, as professors have become more liberal, they’ve shifted far to the left of the general public and their students, Woessner told The Daily Signal.
A Gallup poll released earlier this month found that 38 percent of Americans identify as conservative, versus 24 percent who identify as liberal.
And while the study by the Higher Education Research Institute reported that liberal students outpace conservative students by nearly 10 percent, roughly half identify as moderate. This has created a wide ideological gap between professors and students.
Graphics: The Washington Post. Used with permission of Christopher Ingraham, Wonkblog.
In 2014, college professors were roughly 30 percentage points more likely to identify as liberal than were college freshmen. Compare that to the 1990 findings, when professors were 16 percentage points more likely to label themselves as liberal than were their freshmen students. Woessner said:
This raises critical questions of whether students are getting a balanced education—not because there’s some conspiracy to block out conservative ideas, but merely because the people who are teaching are either not familiar with or don’t embrace conservative ideas.
Even when faculty attempt to present an issue in a balanced and impartial manner, he said, personal biases naturally bleed into material.
According to 2009 data from the Higher Education Research Institute, the number of students who said their political views were “liberal” or “far left” jumped 9.2 percentage points from freshman to senior year.
Carson Holloway, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska Omaha, said the imbalance is most notable in the humanities and social science fields, where the battle of ideas is most important.
Holloway, who also chairs the Council of Academic Advisers at The Heritage Foundation, said the average political scientist in the U.S. is a “mainstream” liberal.
The problem with this, he said, is that a lot of “impressive” thought stemming from Europe fostered conservative ideology, but because not many in the academy represent that tradition, students get a skewed view.
“They might tend to think that conservatism is not an intellectual tradition because they don’t see any professors who hold to it, so there’s a distortion that emerges there,” Holloway told The Daily Signal.
Woessner said the students who are harmed the most by the bias in academia are the liberal ones:
Conservatives benefit from having liberal ideas to expand their horizons and challenge their thinking, but ideologically liberal students get their ideas reinforced. This means they’re not growing intellectually because they don’t have the exposure to other ideas to make them think.
Woessner said an equal number of liberal and conservative professors isn’t necessary for higher education to work well, but at least a small minority of faculty on campus should hold different views.
Conservatives who want to become involved in higher education face challenges, he said, and universities should encourage more right-leaning academics to become professors to help shrink the ideological gap.
“The goal should not be an even split, because that’s probably impossible, but to create a space for enough conservative ideas that students are exposed at least nominally to these other perspectives,” Woessner said.
And although a prescriptive fix to obtain greater balance won’t happen on its own, Klein said, “donors, students and parents should vote with their dollars, and voters should vote with their votes against pouring taxpayer money into a leftist apparatus.”
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/liberal-professors-outnumber-conservative-faculty-5-to-1/
Dorian permalink
January 17, 2016 12:26 pm
You can blame tenure for this situation. Tenure was supposed to protect those with controversial or antithetical opinions. However, shield laws like tenure only protect orthodoxy. Liberalism has always been antagonistic to a competitive pedagogy, their reasoning has always been distorted towards unifying an inherently biased universal pedagogic monism. Thus, you will only see education at all levels become more and more Liberal (read Socialistic), because argumentation and competitive thought is an anathema to them. To a Liberal/Socialist, rhetoric is a language device where people discuss and argue how to achieve common thought, and worse social monism, and, not about using language to analyse competitive theories and surmount dogma and baseless orthodoxy and provide social diversity.
And now this Liberal orthodoxy that has been growing in the our educational institutions for the past few hundred years has reached critical mass. To keep this cancerous Liberal Thought going in our universities and schools it has become corrupt. Before there were too few of these bigots and zealots to matter, but now there are so many of them, they are starving of funds, for they have idle hands. Thus the growth of ridiculous theories like Global Warming are now created, just so they can feed their corrupt congeries.
You want more balanced education? Then get rid of tenure and all other shield laws. Open education to the light of knowledge.
botanyjrg permalink
January 17, 2016 1:16 pm
My true story. I returned to WV to care for my parents. I had worked at the Smithsonian Institution in the US National Herbarium. When WVU, my alma mater, told me I could only be a secretary with an MA, I returned to UNC and completed a PhD in taxonomy/ecosystematics. In 1994 I was asked to interview for head of the WVU Herbarium. I received a phone call at the interview (no one knew I was there) and a voice with a phoney WV accent asked who “gave” a WV woman a PhD? This was the dept. where I had graduated cum laude. He then said his name was “Walter Mitty”(would not have fooled me from jr. high forward). At that point I asked who was on the phone and found it was the head of the search committee. The rest of the day was designed to make me lose my temper, but I did not. I had known these people and been in a seminar group with them. The advertised salary had been drastically lowered and teaching removed for me. The dept. chairman (from Wales) then told me that if it did not work out, he could use a secretary. A week later I received a phone call from “Walter Mitty” saying I could not be hired as I was the “wrong politics” and furthermore, “we have to have someone who will do and say whatever the environmentalists say.” He also berated me for not taking “his” phone call seriously. I had just begun to care for my late mother and did that for 7 years. I taught at a nearby college for a friend who periodically took off for somewhere in the world and also assisted teaching dendrology (tree id.) in the Div. of Forestry at WVU. Almost every week, some leftist politician is on the radio bemoaning that the “talented and educated West Virginians leave the state”. Well, I came back and it cost me everything. What a waste and all for leftist politics. But I can look myself in the mirror without cringing over what I’ve done. The least diverse place in the United States in the American college campus.
I posted something similar to this on the Daily Signal article yesterday. When I was at WVU, things were very different. My late father, a Republican, taught chemistry. His PhD was from MIT. My brothers’ PhD’s were chemistry, Cornell and physics, Univ. of Rochester. Today, young people have “conventional wisdom” drummed into them at every turn that if you are conservative you are mentally lacking, uneducated, hateful, bigoted and to be treated with open contempt. I inherited the very valuable 5 acre property where I grew up which my parents purchased in 1937. However, WVU is getting $19.94 from me in honor of that interview year. UNC will get little or nothing. I will not fund this type of crap. Rather, Hillsdale College in Michigan which accepts no government monies even in the form of student scholarships will be a huge beneficiary (and they don’t know it). They teach the Constitution to every student and have online courses which we can all take for free. Recent new ones are a series on Winston Churchill and C. S. Lewis.
As a footnote. I believe that the word not to hire me came from a plant ecologist who had become provost. A vindictive person, he did not like my graduate major professor. He was demoted a number of years ago over the scandal when HE gave the daughter of then Governor, Joe Manchin, an eMBA degree for which she had only completed half the credits when it was discovered she did not have the degree she claimed as CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals. This is what you get when ethics is not the major pursuit.
[ Interesting footnote: The woman mentioned in the preceding paragraph is Heather Bresch, daughter of Joe Manchin. She is indeed CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals. From Wikipedia's entries for Heather Bresch & Michael Garrison:
Bresch was an MBA student at West Virginia University until 1998. In 2007, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Bresch had claimed to have an MBA degree from West Virginia University, but the university disputed that. The university subsequently awarded her an MBA despite her not having attained sufficient credits (22 out of the required 48). In the ensuing controversy, the university announced in April 2008 that it would rescind Bresch's degree. Michael Garrison, WVU President at the time, was reported to be "a family friend and former business associate of Bresch" [7] and a former consultant and lobbyist for Mylan. [8] After a faculty vote of no confidence, Garrison and several university officials subsequently resigned. [9] [10]
......At a WVU basketball game in 1992, Bresch's father mentioned his daughter's job search to Mylan CEO Milan Puskar. The company soon thereafter offered her a low-level position in the quality control department of a factory in Morgantown. According to Bresch, she had misgivings about the offer. Her father said she should "absolutely take it" and try for a year. She took his advice, and started as a clerk, typing labels. She received frequent promotions during the following years, "working hard and learning the industry inside out". [4]
From 2002 to 2005, Bresch served as Mylan's director of government relations. [11] [12] She contributed to the development of the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA, also known as "Medicare Part D"). [13]
.....
In 2008 Garrison became involved in a controversy involving the granting of an MBA degree to Heather Bresch, who had failed to complete the required credits. A panel led by WVU faculty members produced a report on the incident described by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as criticising the university administration for having made "a 'seriously flawed' decision fraught with favoritism." [11] In May 2008 the faculty senate voted 77-19 to call for Garrison's resignation [12] - a demand repeated by a vote (565-39, with 11 abstentions) open to all WVU faculty at a mass meeting a week later. [13] In August 2012, West Virginia University officially closed its investigation, reaching no conclusion but foreseeing "unreasonable delays in investigating complaints of misconduct" raised questions about violations of due process rights. [14]
On June 6, 2008, Garrison officially announced he would resign as President of the University effective September 1, 2008. [15] In October 2008 a West Virginia grand jury decided not to indict Garrison on criminal charges relating to the degree scandal. [16] Some news accounts alleged a friendly relationship between Garrison and the Governor, but the official WVU investigation ended before reaching the same conclusion. [14] ] |
