A Democratic Education at Cal

Republican professors in the minority at Berkeley

By Derek Yee
From the December 2006 Print Edition

The University of California at Berkeley is a bastion of free speech, hence the various political ideologies — from reactionary to rational — that permeate the campus. However, it is an open secret that a liberal bias is creeping into the lectures of some of UC Berkeley’s professors. The fact that professors in general across the United States are liberal is old news, with 72 percent identifying as liberal and only 15 percent as conservatives, according to a March 2005 article in the Washington Post. However, the extent to which professors express their political beliefs is a different issue.

In July 2003, UC Berkeley faculty voted in favor of a revision of a policy on academic freedom that had been in place for seventy years, which has essentially allowed professors to convey their political beliefs more freely. At the time, a debate was weighed back and forth among supporters of absolute freedom for professor speech and the fear that some of the faculty and students might abuse the new policy and indoctrinate their pupils, quashing independent thinking. The old policy, established during the Depression in the 1930s, sought to prevent "left-wing infiltration," according to an article in the published on August 20, 2003, in the Berkeleyan.

The California Patriot recently decided to look into the political affiliations of UC Berkeley faculty members from various departments. The purpose of the investigation was to see whether some departments have a tendency toward a particular political bias. The data collected came from public records at the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office in Oakland, and as a result included only professors who are registered to vote in the county. A professor’s political bias may be more obvious in some departments than in others. For example, in the study of math and some of the sciences, politics is of little or no importance. In the humanities, however, a professor’s political beliefs may considerably alter the choice of topics and direction of lectures.

UC Berkeley’s history department prides itself in teaching a wide variety of histories. "Although in recent years the department’s strengths in cultural, intellectual, and political history have been the most widely noted, the department’s distinction in social, economic, international and other kinds of history is also recognized throughout the world," according to the department Web site. Out of 71 percent of the current history faculty, 80 percent are registered Democrats, while only 5 percent are registered Republicans, and 15 percent are non-partisan. The history department as a whole clearly sways to the left, which could influence its "strength" as a department that teaches political history.

The psychology department is another larger department at UC Berkeley. The faculty are interested in, among other things, "how culture shapes the way in which people view the world," according to department chairman Stephen Hinshaw on the psychology department’s Web site. Out of half of the psychology faculty, 90.3 percent are registered Democrats, 6.5 percent are registered Greens, and 3.2 percent are non-partisan. Based on this data, virtually the entire psychology department leans to the left with no exceptions. If the professors in the psychology department teach according to their political viewpoints, then students in that department will hear only left-wing viewpoints with no countervailing worldviews.

The Patriot also looked into some smaller departments that are often perceived as quite liberal and found some interesting patterns. An interesting wrinkle in the data, albeit a small wrinkle in the overall trends, was that among the faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, a full 16.7 percent were registered Republicans. Out of 86 percent of Gender and Women’s Studies faculty members, 50 percent are Independent or non-partisan, and only 33 percent are registered Democrats.

Yet another humanities department that has been traditionally thought of as a bastion of left-wing ideology is the Ethnic Studies Department. Ethnic Studies is really an umbrella department for Asian American studies, Chicano studies, ethnic studies, and Native American studies created out of the social upheaval and racial division of the 1960s. Among 65 percent of faculty members, 54.5 percent are registered Democrats, 36.4 percent are non-partisan, and 9.1 percent are members of the La Raza Unida Party. The Ethnic Studies Department is one of the "oldest (a relative claim indeed) programs in the country focusing on race and ethnicity" which have throughout their history proved to be environments hostile toward conservative or libertarian principles of race-neutral thought and societies.

Another department shown to be quite liberal throughout our investigation is the sociology department. According the chairman, the sociology department is "reputed for studies of states, institutions, culture, gender, poverty, immigration, labor, and women’s movements, social mobility, development, affirmative action, schooling, working families, intellectuals, urban gangs, children, prisons, and churches." Studies in these topics are clearly a part of the leftist agenda. Surprisingly for such a highly politicized group of intellectuals, only 47 percent of the sociology department faculty is registered to vote in Alameda County. What was not surprising was that there was not a single registered Republican in the department. Out of those who were registered in Alameda County, 92.9 percent were registered Democrats.

The liberal bias is not limited to those departments that are traditionally seen as being liberal. The Patriot looked at the Haas School of Business faculty as well as the economics department faculty, which would seem to be more conservative. However, they were not much more conservative than the so-called liberal departments. Out of 47 percent of the Haas faculty, 74.2 percent are registered Democrats, while only 8.1 percent are registered Republicans and 13.7 percent are non-partisan. The remainder of the faculty is associated with the Libertarian, Green, and American Independent parties. In the economics department, 44 percent of the faculty is registered in Alameda County. Out of those, 65.9 percent are registered Democrats, 13.6 percent are registered Republicans, and 15.9 percent are non-partisan. While one might think that these faculties would be more conservative, both still showed a proportion of Democrats that was much greater than in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department.

According to the Berkeleyan article on the 2003 academic-freedom bill, the new policy states, "the University seeks to foster in its students a mature independence of mind, and this purpose cannot be achieved unless students are free within the classroom to express the widest range of viewpoints." Whether students are free to express a wide range of viewpoints in their classrooms is in question. A look at the now confirmed overwhelmingly left-wing political orientation of Berkeley professors begs the question, can conservative students feel comfortable about conveying their personal ideas?

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