Teaching rhetoric (especially since I focus on economics) naturally leads to the political. I’ve noticed that when I was teaching within a business school, the faculty and students were decidedly center-right with a handful of center-left viewpoints represented. Largely, economists are pragmatists with more faith in statistical models than political parties. Many of my colleagues had advised politicians of both parties, and were largely ignored.
When teaching within English, communications, or philosophy, I have noticed a decidedly more activist political atmosphere. Unlike the economists and business professors, these faculty and their students have strong and passionate ideological positions.
People, including scholars, self-sort and work with similar people. Professions have natural political groupings, too. These change and evolve with time. You can estimate some generalizations about a person based on career choice, and within academia you can infer generalities based on discipline.
The problem within academia, however, is that a uniformity of views risks groupthink. As the following article suggests, professors are surrounded by like-minded colleagues. This makes it difficult to understand other perspectives.
2 in 5 Top-Ranking Liberal Arts Schools Have No Full-Time Republican Professors
New study explores liberal bias of university faculty—it’s worse than we thought
Liz Wolfe | May 17, 2018In late April, Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor at Brooklyn College, published a study on ideological homogeneity at liberal arts colleges in the journal Academic Questions. His findings confirm what many right-wingers have been whispering—and shouting—about for a while now: nearly 39 percent of the colleges sampled are Republican-free, in terms of faculty ideological makeup.
Langbert sampled 8,688 tenure track Ph.D.-holding professors from the top 51 liberal arts schools, according to the 2017 U.S. News and World Report list. He used only full-time, tenure track faculty (full, associate, or assistant professors) and excluded all part-time professors (adjunct, visiting, and emeritus). Langbert then matched these names with voter registration records, using only colleges in states where voter registration information is public.
He also excluded 101 professors—a little more than one percent of the total sample—from the analysis, because they were registered as members of minor parties (cue big-L libertarian weeping).
He found “a D:R ratio of 10.4:1 across all liberal arts departments if the military colleges are included and 12.7:1 if the military colleges are excluded.” Unsurprisingly, the hard sciences—engineering, chemistry, physics, and mathematics—had more even ratios of Democrats to Republicans than fields like sociology, english, religion, and anthropology. Communications ranked highest in terms of ideological homogeneity skewed toward the left.
In total, he found more than 800 departments that did not employ a single Republican, and only 225 that did—so around 78 percent of departments did not contain a single full-time professor who identifies as Republican.
I’m unaffiliated as a voter, and that probably mirrors many of my colleagues in economics and business. But, this makes me an outlier when teaching in the humanities. The lack of Republicans in some disciplines doesn’t trouble me greatly because I cannot imagine many Republicans seeking to teach in gender studies or similar fields.
Still, our bubbles in academia should concern us as educators. If you don’t know and interact with people of other perspectives, it is easier to caricature those viewpoints.