Even for those to whom this comes as no news, the study just published in American Enterprise magazine shows a uniformity of political allegiance in major university faculties that is positively breathtaking. The researchers visited Boards of Elections in the areas of 21 colleges or universities, including such institutions as Cornell, Brown, Harvard, Penn State, Stanford, Syracuse, Berkeley, UCLA, the State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of Colorado.
They looked at party registration for faculty members in various disciplines. Even discounting that the researchers had only limited registration records in some places, there is little doubt their statistics capture the general political picture.
The study divided the parties into right or left: Republican or Libertarian on the right, and Democrat, Green or the like on the left. At Cornell, they found one English Department member in a party of the right as opposed to 35 registered on the left. In the History Department they found no one registered on the right, but 29 on the left.
At Harvard, the researchers found one member of the Political Science Department on the right versus 20 on the left. Roughly the same held true for Economics and Sociology. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, close to the Reagan ranch, the ratio across five departments was 72 to one. The nearest thing to a conservative bastion is the Stanford Economics Department, where seven of 28 members (25%!) belong to the right.
So it goes for every university in this study. Which leaves us wishing we could know more about the inner lives--and career prospects--of those intrepid one or two registered Republican academics on these campuses. There is, as the study notes, a wider and freer cross- section of opinion in the aisles of any grocery store or city bus than there is now at our colleges and universities.
That this lack of faculty diversity eludes university administrators is especially interesting given the totality of their efforts to re-order all other aspects of campus life based on that principle. In the name of this cardinal value, administrators target groups for recruitment, shape curricula, designate some sports for funding in the name of gender equity while cutting others, and so much more. It's virtually impossible to imagine any university president delivering a major address not saturated with references to diversity and his or her own allegiance thereto.
We favor diversity too. We simply look forward to the day that college administrators stop preening about the principle long enough to see how little of it exists among the most powerful and influential force on campus--their own teachers.
(Fri Aug 30, 2002 - 2:14:31 pm)
