The Patriot Post® · No Conservative or Republican Professors Wanted

So just how bad is leftist bias at America’s places of higher education? Well, according to a recent study from the National Association of Scholars, the imbalance of Democrats to Republicans among college faculty is worse than originally thought. While it’s no secret that America’s universities have for decades been more heavily populated with leftist professors than conservatives, the current situation can only be described as absolute domination. Forget the notion that conservative professors represent a minority, in nearly eight out of 10 of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges, Republican faculty are simply non-existent. According to the study’s author, Mitchell Langbert, 78.2% of academic departments have either zero or so few Republican professors as to make no difference.

Langbert further explains:

> My sample of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report consists of 5,197, or 59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis.1 If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.

Not surprisingly, Langbert found that the disparity between Democrat and Republican faculty was greatest in the fields of the social sciences and humanities, while less so in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. That said, even in those STEM fields the disparity heavily favored Democrats.

Langbert noted that over the decades the trend among faculty toward the Left has only increased. “More than a decade ago,” he said, “Stanley Rothman and colleagues provided evidence that while 39 percent of the professoriate on average described itself as Left in 1984, 72 percent did so in 1999.” And it is quite apparent that the disparity has only increased. Langbert further observed, “Political homogeneity is problematic because it biases research and teaching and reduces academic credibility.” The most ironic aspect of this study is that academic leftists fancy themselves the leading proponents and defenders of diversity.