Survey says...

Left dominates faculty

By Julia Baumgaertner
From the March 2004 Print Edition

Left-wing liberals, lend me your ears. Though you are plied with ideological Communism in the classroom, I dare you to be eccentric and think outside the box. Fight the dominant paradigm! Challenge the norms of academia while expanding your mind, and enroll in a conservative professor’s class. If you are unable to register, however, I doubt it is because the waitlist is full; it will not take a Lawrence Livermore Lab scientist to tell you that one might not exist. Surprising? Hardly.

National surveys attempt to explain this quandary by investigating voter registration amongst university professors, and the statistics are shocking. While the vast majority of professors bask in the tenured comfort of their ivory towers, an unchecked hunt-down of right-thinking professors ensues. Nowadays this dying breed finds more use in practicing free market policies than in teaching them, and the resultant homogeneity of political leanings amongst professors does great academic disservice to students and destroys the very essence of the university. The political atmosphere of universities across the United States has become a liberal vacuum, silencing any voice of conservatism within higher education.

The statistics, reported by David Horowitz, a watchdog for politics in academia, speak for themselves. At the University of California, Berkeley, of the 195 professors examined, 85% were Democrats, 8% Republicans, and 4% Greens. Out of 54 professors in the History Department, only one Republican could be found, while no Republicans were found out of 28 Sociology professors, 57 English professors, 16 Women’s Studies professors, 9 African-American Studies professors, and 6 Journalism professors.

The complete report revealed some staggering stats. Horowitz writes, “The overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans we were able to identify at the 32 schools was more than 10 to 1. Although in the nation at large registered Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal in number, not a single department at a single one of the 32 schools managed to achieve a reasonable parity between the two.”

The administration is just as unbalanced. Frontpagemag.com reported that the final numbers for UC Berkeley professors and administrators were: 100 Democrats, eight Republicans, 80 unaffiliated, and six miscellaneous.

These glaring disparities in professor partisanship shed light on the problem of what has become a one-sided educational system. I do not seek to compound the incessant claims of discrimination regarding conservatism on college campuses, but rather to expose the consequences of a college education without challenges of principles and political position. Cambridge University in England, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities, cites the following as core values in education: freedom of thought and expression, freedom from discrimination, and the encouragement of a questioning spirit. It is painfully obvious that America’s universities lack these qualities, and it is the students who suffer for it.

Students today are not intellectually challenged. They listen to a monotonous drone of anti-establishment rhetoric, ironically putting their activist youth at a crippling disadvantage. They are harmed by the deprivation of ideological challenges—challenges meant to strengthen the formulation and defense of one’s beliefs. In many of America’s universities, adoption of the prescribed political ideology guarantees a professor a successful tenure bid, while those refusing to acquiesce are placed in a subordinate caste. Without a diverse faculty, how can a university claim to foster “diversity?”

Ironically, universities hold the intellectual future of America in a virtual stranglehold. There is a light at the end of the tunnel; conservative students are actively sharpening their minds and practicing the mental skills vital to creative problem-solving. Conservatism on campus has seen an upsurge, and nationally, college students are more conservative than ever, slowly but surely starting to restore diversity of thought and ideology to America’s college system. With true freedom and diversity of thought, Berkeley can create an individual like myself, who plans on utilizing the capitalist system to someday own a solitary, all-American ranch in Montana, where I will Bikram Yoga myself into complete enlightenment. I’ll even put down my Foucault to vote Republican on November 2.

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