New Study Suggests Faculty Bias at Brown

While anecdotal evidence has typically been used to show that faculty at Ivy League universities are politically slanted towards the left, only recently have actual statistical studies been conducted to show the true extent of that bias. The results only confirmed what had been obvious to many students – that the faculty of humanities departments not only tilt towards the left, but are completely slanted in that direction.

A study conducted by The American Enteiyrise (TAE) along with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture for its September 2002 issue examined the political party enrollments of professors listed in local voter registration records among a cross section of universities. For Brown, the study found that 94.7 percent of the professors in the liberal arts faculty whose political affiliations showed up in 2001 primary registrations last year were Democrats and only 5.3 percent were Republicans. There were no republicans in the English, History, Political Science, Africana Studies, or Sociology departments. The three republican professors on the survey came from the Economics and Engineering departments. The TAE’s editors reacted to the results, saying “Colleges like to characterize themselves as wide open places where all ideals may be pursed freely, but they are now hostile environments for economic and cultural conservatives.”

Moreover, similar statistics were found at other schools. At the University of Colorado 94 percent of the liberal arts faculty are Democrats, and at the University of New Mexico 89 percent are Democrats. “The exclusion of conservatives from the faculty of Brown and other schools is a form of intellectual totalitarianism, which accounts for the relative mediocrity of today’s academic elite,” said conservative activist David Horowitz.

In addition to the TAE study, pollster Frank Luntz conducted a survey specifically of Ivy League faculty which found, “a painfully evident lack of diversity when it comes to the attitudes and values of Ivy League faculty and an alarming uniformity among the guardians of our best and brightest minds.” Luntz found that only 6 percent of Ivy League professors would describe themselves as either conservative or somewhat conservative and only three percent consider themselves Republicans. A large 84 percent of the Ivy faculty voted for Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential election. When asked who they thought has been the best President in the past 40 years, the top four choices were all Democrats, with Bill Clinton in first place. When asked to pick from a list of political interest groups, only 1 percent of Ivy League professors identified with the National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition, or the National Taxpayers Union, by contrast 44 percent identified with the ACLU.

Moreover, Luntz also found that “this group of educators is almost uniformly outside of mainstream, moderate, middle-of-the-road American political thought.” On a broad range of policy questions, large majorities of professors favored the liberal position. 80 percent of Ivy professors disagree with the idea of a tax cut, 75 percent of them are against school vouchers, and 74 percent are not in favor of a missile defense system. Even on more controversial ideas such as slavery reparations, 40 percent of Ivy League professors agree with some form of reparations while only 11 percent of all Americans agree with some form of compensation. When analyzing these results, Luntz wrote in his report, “It is valuable for our nation’s brightest students to be exposed to a diversity of thoughts, ideas, and attitudes, but sadly, the Ivy League fails to deliver.”

The surveys studied professors from the social sciences and humanities since those are the fields were ideological bias can most impact what goes on in the classroom. For example, it is much easier to impart a political bias when discussing political science than it is in a chemistry class, for example. As Horowitz said, “the most basic value of a liberal education is to keep an open mind because no one has a monopoly on truth. Obviously the most basic diversity for a university is diversity of viewpoint — which is the one diversity missing from the contemporary academy.”

These results have obvious ramifications, which many people at Brown will not like. Both students and administrators often speak of diversity at our school in the context of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. However, as the studies make painfully clear, they are missing a crucial component of diversity ideology. If everyone on campus looks different but still thinks alike, then we have only traded one form of homogeneity for another. I myself am a fairly liberal Democrat, but I would not mind seeing my professors give different points of view in class. Brown is doing its students a vast disservice by not hiring more conservative faculty members. Our faculty, as talented as they are in their fields, resembles one big left-wing reunion when it comes to their political beliefs. Students will not be challenged to the fullest extent until the faculty is more ideologically diverse. Since President Ruth Simmons wants to hire a hundred new faculty members at Brown over the next few years, this is the perfect opportunity to remedy the glaring lack of ideological differences among the current faculty. The goal for Brown should be to make the faculty think as different as they look.