NY Times: Liberal Profs Outnumber Conservative Profs 28:1 In New England
By Paul Caron
New York Times Sunday Review: There Are Conservative Professors. Just Not in These States, by Samuel J. Adams (Sarah Lawrence College):
In surveys of the ideological leanings of college faculty members by the Higher Education Research Institute from 1989 through 2014, the percentage of those identifying as liberal has always outnumbered moderates and conservatives, but the data show a notable shift left in the middle of the 1990s. In 1989, roughly 40 percent of professors were moderate and 40 percent were liberal; the remaining 20 percent were conservative. By 2014, liberal identifiers jumped to 60 percent, with moderates declining to 30 percent and conservatives to just 10 percent.
But the story turns out to be more complicated than this, since the shift left is far from uniform. ... Surprisingly, the factor that had the greatest impact on the ideological leanings of college professors was their geographic region.
And the region with the most impact? By far, New England.
Faculty members in New England are far more liberal than their counterparts anywhere else in the nation, even controlling for discipline and school type. In 1989, the number of liberals compared with conservatives on college campuses was about 2 to 1 nationwide; that figure was almost 5 to 1 for New England schools. By 2014, the national figure was 6 to 1; for those teaching in New England, the figure was 28 to 1.
Even the professoriate in the far west — the liberal “left coast” — saw the ratio of liberal to conservative professors jump only to 6 to 1, from about 3 to 1, during that time. Those teaching in other regions, from the Plains to the Southeast, saw far smaller changes, to 3 to 1, up from 1 to 1, on average. ... Interestingly, the one region that bucks the national liberal trend is not the South (as some might assume) but rather the Rocky Mountain region: Idaho, Montana, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Here, between 1989 and 2014, the liberal to conservative professor ratio dropped to 1.5 to 1, from 2 to 1.
The liberalism of the New England professoriate is so pronounced that it makes certain academic fields and college types appear far more politically extreme in the aggregate than what you would find in a typical college classroom. For instance, private colleges in aggregate appear to be leading the charge to the left by being far more liberal than private universities or religious schools. However, when New England schools are taken out of the data, private colleges and all other college types are showing roughly the same slight tilt to the left — a much smaller growth to 4 to 1, from 2 to 1. The larger pull reflects the pronounced liberalism in the Northeast. ...
I cannot say for certain why New England is so far to the left. But what I can say, based on the evidence, is that if you are looking for an ideologically balanced education, don’t put New England at the top of your list.
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