The Political Spectrum

Several sites have noted this story in the New York Times by John Tierney which takes a look at the liberal bias of the universities. Among the higlights

One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.

Tierney also notes the huge disparity in campaign contributions. As someone who works at a place that studies campaign finance issues, I can personally attest to the enormous gap between contributions to Democrats and contributions to Republicans.

Why this gap? Here's the snotty answer given by one Democrat at UC-Berkeley:

One theory for the scarcity of Republican professors is that conservatives are simply not that interested in academic careers. A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches linguistics and is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views. "Unlike conservatives," he said, "they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about."

That's right, we conservatives think nothing of the public good and are just interested in fattening our wallets.

A better answer follows:

Some non-Democrats prefer to attribute the imbalance to the structure of academia, which allows hiring decisions and research agendas to be determined by small, independent groups of scholars. These fiefs, the critics say, suffer from a problem described in The Federalist Papers: an autonomous "small republic" is prone to be dominated by a cohesive faction that uses majority voting to "outnumber and oppress the rest," in Madison's words.

Whatever the cause, this is a serious problem, both personally and for the public at large. On a personal level it is discouraging because it severely curtails my desire to join the academic job market. I am not one who can keep silent while my colleagues push a liberal agenda, thus I know that it would be difficult to sit on a staff where almost everyone is hostile to my point of view. Think tanks are attractive to me because I know that I will have much more freedom, and at the same time I will get to influence public policy on some level. I do want to teach younger people about the ideas that shape our republic, but that requires fighting my way through a system where the odds are stacked against me.

On a national level, this is a severe problem. We cannot have a university system where 90% of the professors are of the same ideological persuasion, liberal or conservative. Young people need to learn in an environment where all ideas are given credence. Now, I have had several liberal professors who are very fair and do not push any sort of ideological agenda, but there are far too many instances of students being bullied or shot down simply for having an opposing viewpoint, and that should not be tolerated.

There are signs that despite this heavy tilt in one direction, students are resisting indoctrination. There are many more campus conservatives than in days of yore, and they are not sitting idly by. Perhaps this is just the rebellious nature of youth - now it is the left that is being rebelled against.

Nonetheless, it is my hope that universities begin to be balanced out. Perhaps they will go the way of the old media and new universities will be born (like Ave Maria) that will offer an alternative. Until then, the liberal monopoly on campuses continues.