Diversity on Campus? There Is None
By Karl Zinsmeister

Back in 1995--in the September/October issue of The American Enterprise, just my fifth installment as editor--we at TAE put together the first systematic study documenting imbalances in the political choices of American professors.

 

We sent Cornell University student Kenneth Lee and a counterpart at Stanford University trudging down to the elections bureaus in the counties where their colleges are based. Armed with faculty lists, they counted up the party registrations of their institutions' instructors.

 

By the time we were done, we had located 199 Cornell professors and 186 Stanford profs who had registered themselves as either Democrats or Republicans in the records of the Tompkins County Board of Elections or the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. These individuals were arrayed in nine different faculties, including mainstream departments like government/political science, economics, sociology, and history where it is hard to see how balanced instruction can take place without a range of political viewpoints.

 

The results: Our Cornell sample showed 171 Democrats, 7 Republicans, and 21 professors registered as independents or in other (mostly left-wing) parties. The Stanford professors broke out this way: 163 Democrats, 17 Republicans, and 6 independent/other.

 

Our reporter Ken Lee (an Asian American) commented that, "For years, liberals have argued that the underrepresentation of minority professors is proof of racism, and they have implemented affirmative programs to reach the goal of proportional representation." Since Republicans are as common among the American public as Democrats, and claim an even higher proportion of the college-educated population, Lee suggested:

 

 

"Perhaps universities should recruit intellectually conservative professors with the same zeal they display for balancing flesh tones. Political lopsidedness does not bode well for the educational process. While today's students are taught by professors of diverse skin colors, they are not exposed to a diversity of ideas. The university, once dubbed the free marketplace of ideas, has been transformed into a gray one-party state where only one set of views thrive."

 

Faced with this hard evidence that their classrooms, workplaces, and campuses were embarassingly unbalanced, a number of academic spokesmen discounted our study. We had only looked at two campuses, they scoffed. We had only considered nine academic departments.

 

But our Cornell/Stanford data inspired other groups to carry out similar studies on additional campuses. And in 2001, TAE organized a large, year-long effort (in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles) to replicate our faculty voter registration study at a total of 19 campuses, carefully chosen to represent a wide range of schools--from Harvard to the University of Houston, from Penn State to San Diego State, from the University of Denver to Davidson College.

 

We painstakingly sorted professors into two groups: Those registered in parties of the Left (Democrat, Green, Working Families) or parties of the Right (Republican, Libertarian). Lest critics accuse us of cherry-picking only fringe disciplines, we mostly limited our count to professors from major, uncontroversial, and socially significant fields like economics, engineering, English, history, journalism, poli-sci, and sociology.

 

The results, which we published in the September 2002 issue of The American Enterprise, closely overlapped with our pioneering Cornell/Stanford study. At Brown University, for instance, we uncovered a total of 54 professors registered in a party of the Left, to just 3 registered in a party of the Right. At the University of Colorado, it was 116 on the Left, to 5 on the Right. UCLA totalled 141 professors on the Left, 9 on the Right. The University of Maryland: 59 Left, 10 Right. Syracuse University: 50 Left, 2 Right. And so on.

 

Still, the academic apologists sniffed. We were light on science professors, they said. This wasn't a traditional academic study. The American Enterprise is a center-right publication, not a refereed social science journal.

 

Well, the last excuses for the campus administrators still in denial have just evaporated. This November, three academics--Daniel Klein (an economist at Santa Clara University), Andrew Western (a student at the same institution), and Charlotta Stern (a professor at Stockholm University)--published two carefully constructed academic studies of party registration and ideology among academics at a range of institutions.

 

The principal investigator was Professor Klein, a tenured faculty member who prominently declares that he is not a Republican or conservative himself. Klein's studies go beyond the earlier TAE investigations in several ways: By searching adjoining counties as well as the county where the university is located, he managed to locate voter registration records for a higher proportion of faculty (a total of several hundred professors at each campus). He investigated a wider range of academic disciplines--a total of 23 different departments. He tabulated his data more finely--comparing faculty by their level of seniority, for instance, and their sex. And Klein's studies (tabulated with the assistance of the Leavey School of Business, with funding from the Robert Finocchio Fund at Santa Clara University) fastidiously followed all the conventions of blind, controlled academic research.

 

The full results, downloadable at NAS.org, will eventually be published in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. There are two separate papers; the first assiduously counts the number of registered Democrats and Republicans at two major institutions located near Klein: the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University.

 

On the Berkeley faculty, Klein and Western uncovered 445 Democrats and 45 Republicans, a ratio of 10:1. At Stanford, they located 275 Democrats and 36 Republicans; that comes to 8:1. The most extreme mono-mindedness exists among female faculty. At Berkeley and Stanford, female professors break out this way: 172 Democrats versus a total of 7 Republicans. That's 25:1.

Most of the specific academic departments at each of these universities had zero, one, or two Republicans at most. The departments that came closest to balance were electrical engineering (40 Democrats and 13 Republicans at the two campuses combined), civil and environmental engineering (24 D, 7 R), mathematics (35 D, 9 R), chemistry (42 D, 9 R), and law (55 D, 8 R). Even the accounting and marketing departments at Berkeley and Stanford--business bastions which ought to have room for Republicans--showed 8:1 ratios of D over R.

 

"The data indicate that the one-party character of academia is quite uniform across campus," summarize Klein and Western. Because their exceptionally detailed findings match closely to the results published earlier in The American Enterprise for those same campuses, the authors pronounce the TAE/CSPC results that exposed this phenomenon on dozens of campuses to be "sound."

 

The mono-mindedness on campus is actually deeper than even these data indicate, Klein and Western suggest, and likely to deteriorate in the future. Why? Because the few Republicans who do exist on campus are mostly older faculty. Among full professors at Berkeley and Stanford, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 7:1. But among younger untenured assistant and associate profes-sors it's a ridiculous 31:1. Among the rising generation of professors, in other words, Republicans are almost extinct.

 

This, Klein and Western comment, "strongly suggests the problem has gotten worse over the past decades, and suggests that selection mechanisms have been working in ways that eliminate Republicans.... The situation will get worse before it gets better, because the full professors, where Republicans are to be found, are the ones who will exit the population soonest."

 

College campuses today, the authors conclude forcefully, are way out of whack politically. The dominant orthodoxy "amounts to a one-party system. That is no longer a matter of conjecture. It is established fact."

 

Mulling "the meaning of political lopsidedness for university life," Klein and Western observe that since "university departments operate on the basis of majoritarianism...a ratio of even 2:1 is deadly to the minority. A ratio of 5:1 means marginalization. Someone of a minority viewpoint is frequently dependent on the cooperation of her departmental colleagues for many small considerations. Lopsidedness means that dissenters are avoided or expelled, and that any who survive are very unlikely to be vocal critics of the dominant viewpoints."

 

Seeking to make his research on campus ideology the final word on the subject, Klein put together a second study that expands his findings in several directions. While his Berkeley/ Stanford numbers represent a snapshot in time, the second study documents professor behavior over a decade. It uses a com- pletely different methodology, and a different sample of academics. Between the two approaches, nearly all bases are covered.

 

This second study, which Klein conducted with Charlotta Stern, began in the spring of 2003, when surveys were sent to members of six major professional associations for academics: the American Economics Association, the American Historical Association, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, the American Sociological Association, the American Anthropology Association, and the American Political Science Association.

 

The authors received 1,678 completed surveys, independently controlled and certified by administrators of the Leavey School of Business. Among many other questions, the survey asked: "To which political party have the candidates you've voted for in the past ten years mostly belonged?" Among respondents employed at universities, the ten-year voting patterns were as indicated on the chart found in the PDF version of this article.

 

The survey also included 18 detailed questions on matters of political policy. The answers on these specific topics reinforced the fact that, as the authors put it, "there is little heterogeneity of opinion among Democrats" in academe. "The 'tent' of the Left on campus is not a big tent, but a party-line tent."

 

In this study of ten-year voting patterns, as with the party registration data, no academic discipline had more than a small minority of Republicans. But the degree to which Republicans were outnumbered varied widely. The field closest to being balanced was economics, while the most distorted discipline was anthropology.

 

"Our colleges have become...churches in which you have to be a true believer to get a seat in the pews," the president of the National Association of Scholars, Stephen Balch, recently told the New York Times. Professors have so surrounded themselves with comfortably like-minded colleagues, they don't even realize their warped perspectives are causing them to discriminate against people with different views," suggests Martin Trow, an emeritus professor and former chair of the faculty senate at Berkeley. "Their view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe. Debate is stifled, and conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor judgment."

 

Professors Klein and Stern remark that, "In the U.S. population in general, Left and Right are roughly equal (1:1), like male and female among college students." If a campus has a male-to-female ratio of 3:1 or 10:1 or 15:1, they note, it "would be universally recognized as very lopsided." Yet college administrators continually make excuses for the ideological imbalance of their campuses. Even though "campus culture proclaims discrimination a vice and diversity a virtue," when you come right down to it, "the 'diversity' slogan really means that people of all races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations" are free to "believe the dominant political ideology. Other ideologies are marginalized." On campuses today, "clearly the non-Left points of view have been marginalized."

 

The authors close with a statement that "the 'one-party campus' is a problem irrespective of what one's own views happen to be. The present authors wish to avoid any inference that they approach this issue as partisan Republicans or conservatives. In fact, neither has ever supported or voted for a conservative party.... Even someone with Democratic views might be very disenchanted with the 'groupthink' aspect of campus politics today."

 

Indeed they might.

 

Karl Zinsmeister is TAE Editor in Chief.