Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty

Abstract

This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.

Do liberal arts colleges make students more liberal? Some initial evidence

“…We reasoned that such characteristics, along with others, might also produce an institutional context particularly conducive to the development of liberal political views. For example, liberal arts colleges also focus on academic majors that attract the most liberal faculty-such as the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts (Rothman et al 2005). It also seems reasonable that those academic majors would contribute to attracting more liberal students, who would form a more liberal peer context on campus.…”

The Unreasonable Destructiveness of Political Correctness in Philosophy

“…Survey data on the politics of the American professorship, varyingly gauged as a function of self-reported ideological labels (for instance, ordinal variables such as "extremely liberal" or "slightly liberal") and party affiliation (predilection for voting in Democratic candidates) display a noticeable tendency towards the political Left [33][34][35][36]. This pattern is even more skewed when we consider the clusters of the humanities and social sciences in isolation, thereby confirming another stereotype about academia in general.…”

“…Thus, the epistemic appraisal of an x (such as the computational model of an aircraft) must also be guided by the relevant non-epistemic or contextual values such as safety, resilience, acquisition cost, payload capacity, and firepower. Aerospace engineers naturally also want their fluid dynamics to be approximately true 34 or else their aircraft may not kick off the ground (much less reach escape velocity).…”

“…My sketched account of what I call alethic epistemic values is not as strong and may involve weaker contingencies between a value and the goal of truth. 34 As a matter of fact, in the context of modeling a design problem (Section 5.4), engineers do not need to expend resources computing the truth of natural science which has already stood to massive empirical scrutiny. It is already a given, a part of the fund of knowledge F.…”

Of Publishable Quality: Ideas for Political Science Seminar Papers

“…This approach provides an opportunity to identify possible issues in the publication and can develop the skills necessary for peer review. Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte (2005a) presented evidence that conservatives teach at lower-quality colleges and universities than do liberals, even when controlling for faculty achievement. But Ames et al (2005) identified several potential problems in the analysis and presented alternate explanations for the dearth of conservatives in elite academic institutions, such as self-selection into teaching colleges because of a preference for living in areas that have fewer elite schools.…”