What Would We Do Without Studies?

What Would We Do Without Studies?

"Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find"-- headline, New York
Times, Nov. 18

James Taranto

The WSJ
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November 18, 2004

"Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find"

By JOHN TIERNEY

"BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the free speech movement,
campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the
60's. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and
diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus.

Conservatism is becoming more visible at the University of California
here, where students put out a feisty magazine called The California
Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the largest groups
on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors seem to be
moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign
contributions and two studies being published on Nov. 18.

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.

In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found
a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of
Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the
hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the
humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided
among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183
Democrats versus 6 Republicans.

The political imbalance on faculties has inspired a campaign to have
state legislatures and Congress approve an "academic bill of rights"
protecting students and faculty members from discrimination for their
political beliefs. The campaign is being led by Students for Academic
Freedom, a group with chapters at Berkeley and more than 135 other
campuses. It was founded last year by the leftist-turned-conservative
David Horowitz, who helped start the 1960's antiwar movement while a
graduate student at Berkeley.

"Our goal is not to have the government dictate who's hired but to take
politics out of the hiring process and the classroom," said Mr.
Horowitz, who called the new studies the most compelling evidence yet of
hiring bias. "Right now, conservative students are discouraged from
pursuing scholarly careers, because they see very clearly that their
professors consider Republicans to be the enemy." ******

Academic leaders have resisted his group's legislative proposal, saying
that discrimination is rare and already forbidden, and they dispute the
accusations of faculty bias. Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of
Berkeley, said that he was not sure if the new study of his faculty
accurately reflected the professors' political leanings, and that these
leanings were irrelevant anyway.

"The essence of a great university is developing and sharing new
knowledge as well as questioning old dogma," Dr. Birgeneau said. "We do
this in an environment which prizes academic freedom and freedom of
expression. These principles are respected by all of our faculty at U.C.
Berkeley, no matter what their personal politics are."

Professors at Berkeley and other universities provided unprecedented
financial support for the Democratic Party this election. For the first
time, universities were at the top of the list of organizations ranked
by their employees' contributions to a presidential candidate, according
to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group.

In first and second place, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and
Microsoft, were the University of California system and Harvard, whose
employees contributed $602,000 and $340,000, respectively, to Senator
John Kerry. At both universities, employees gave about $19 to the Kerry
campaign for every dollar for the Bush campaign. ******

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."

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.

"Our colleges have become less marketplaces of ideas than churches in
which you have to be a true believer to get a seat in the pews," said
Stephen H. Balch, a Republican and the president of the National
Association of Scholars. "We've drifted to a secular version of
19th-century denominational colleges, in which the university's mission
is to crusade against sin and make the country a morally better place."

Dr. Balch's organization of what he calls traditional scholars is
publishing the two new faculty studies in its journal, Academic
Questions (online at www.nas.org). In one study, Professor Klein and
Charlotta Stern, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research in
Sweden, asked the members of scholars' professional associations which
party's candidates they had mostly voted for over the previous decade.

The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged from 3 to 1
among economists to 30 to 1 among anthropologists. The researchers found
a much higher share of Republicans among the nonacademic members of the
scholars' associations, which Professor Klein said belied the notion
that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly careers.

"Screened out, expelled or self-sorted, they tend to land outside of
academia because the crucial decisions - awarding tenure and promotions,
choosing which papers get published - are made by colleagues hostile to
their political views," said Professor Klein, who classifies himself as
a libertarian.

Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley who was
chairman of the faculty senate and director of the Center for Studies in
Higher Education, said that professors tried not to discriminate in
hiring based on politics, but that their perspective could be warped
because so many colleagues shared their ideology.

"Their view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what
decent, intelligent human beings believe," said Dr. Trow, who calls
himself a conservative. "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."

The students' magazine, The California Patriot, has frequently
criticized Berkeley for the paucity of conservative views and for cases
of what it has called discrimination against conservative students.

"I'm glad to get the liberal perspective, but it would be nice to get
the other side, too," said Kelly Coyne, the editor of the magazine and a
senior majoring in political science. "I'm really having a hard time
finding courses my last year. I don't want to spend another semester
listening to lectures about victims of American oppression.""
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DSH

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