The One Party Campus?: Battling Ideology
March 9, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
There has been lots of commentary, especially in the US, on the prominence of the Left on universities campuses. Barbara Kay of Canada’s National Post has done some documentation here in Canada.
So far the evidence of left wing bias has been anecdotal and provided by self-interested conservatives. The Left has predictably claimed that being on the Left correlates with higher intelligence. More sophisticated defenders of this uniformity argue that the university is an Enlightenment institution and you’ll naturally find people dedicated to Enlightenment ideals teaching at universities. Nevermind that the Enlightenment also includes heroes of conservatives including John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Lord Acton, and John Stuart Mill.
Now Daniel Klein, an economist from Santa Clara University, has led a team of researchers in conducting a fairly thorough survey of the political views of academics, and he breaks down his data according to academic discipline. The data are startling. By discipline, here’s the ratio of academics who vote Democrat to those who vote Republican (sample size: 1678):
Anthropology 30.2 to 1
Sociology 28.0 to 1
Philosophy 13.5 to 1
History 9.5 to 1
Pol. Science 6.7 to 1
Economics 3.0 to 1
The average ratio is 15.1 to 1.
Citing Steven Balch’s Madisonian explanation of factions, they argue that university governance contributes to this majoritarian imbalance:
Little republics are subject to all the dangers memorably delineated by James Madison in Federalist 10. Being diminutive, they easily fall under the sway of compact majorities that persistently monopolize positions of power and grind down opponents. And because the admission of new academic citizens is subject to the majority’s control, as time passes those majorities tend to expand.
George Will summarizes an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Emory’s Mark Bauerlein (Nov. 12, 2004 issue, excerpted here), who argues that this majoritarianism is driven by the phenomena of “common assumption” and “false consensus effect,” a penetrating analysis resembling groupthink.
There will always be an Anerican University researcher to issue a flaky study to hist the press. Where is the fundamental tryth that Republicans are rightwing and Democrats are Left wing? Belonging to a party in the us is the fact of the minority and attracts essentaillay the conservatives (Chicago University studies…)
I would prefer that they look into positions towards issues, you may discover thet you have liberals and conservatives. The left is concept that is foreign to the US politics since McCartism.
Dear Alcipiar,
You’re quite right to observe the inadequacy of using party preference as a measure of ideological position. The researchers did ask about some policy questions concerning government intervention in society, but they haven’t really worked their methodology out yet. I wouldn’t call their study “flaky” so much as incomplete.
I disagree though with your claim about the lack of a left wing since McCarthy. For instance, LBJ’s “Great Society” (and its aftermath up to and including George W. Bush’s massive spending on *domestic* issues) is not as “left” as one finds in Europe, but within the bounds of American constitutionalism it certainly counts as left wing. One might identify its liberalism with “postive” (as opposed to negative) liberty. Indeed, the “Great Society,” with its roots back in FDR’s New Deal, is part of a liberal ideology that envisages the state as an agent that “helps.” This “helping” ideology is currently in crisis because its leaders aren’t sure right now whom to help. William Voegeli’s article in the latest Claremont Review of Books does a nice job explaining:
http://www.claremont.org/writi.....egeli.html
I’m unsure what you mean by “Chicago University studies.” If you mean the economists at the U. of Chicago who have won Nobel Prizes and have served as advisors to Republican administrations, as well as various right-wing governments in places like Chile, then I suppose that’s an example of the 1 in 3 economists who tilt Republican or right. You’d still need to account for the remaining 2 of 3 economists who helped out the Democrats.
Cordially,
Tom
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