by Sara Russo

A new poll of professors at Ivy League universities has found an alarming disparity between the numbers of liberal and conservative faculty on the campuses.

Commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the survey revealed that of those Ivy League faculty that voted in the 2000 presidential election, more than 80 percent voted for Democrat Al Gore while only nine percent chose Republican candidate George W. Bush. By contrast, the popular vote in America was evenly divided, with 48% going to each candidate.

The other findings of the poll are similarly startling, and reveal how wide the breach is between the views held by Ivy League professors and the beliefs held by ordinary Americans. When asked about a number of highly controversial political issues, including abortion and slavery reparations, the professors consistently gave answers far to the left of the American political mainstream.

On the issue on the recent tax cut, only 13 percent of the Ivy League faculty polled believed that the federal budget surplus should have been returned to the American public as a tax cut, while 67 percent of Americans supported a substantial tax cut. Similarly, on the issue of school choice only 26 percent of the professors believed that "the government should give parents the option of using government-funded school vouchers to pay for tuition at a public, private, or religious school of their choice" compared with 62 percent of all Americans.

An examination of faculty views on the highly politicized issue of abortion displayed a similar disparity. Thirty-seven percent of Ivy League professors believed that abortion should be "legal under any circumstances" compared with 26 percent of all Americans. Even more strikingly, only 1 percent of the professors believed that abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" while 17 percent of Americans at-large agreed with that statement.

The issue of slavery reparations elicited a parallel divide in opinion, with 40 percent of Ivy League professors agreeing that, "The federal government owes American blacks some form of reparations for the harms caused by slavery and discrimination." Only 11 percent of the American public supported this measure.

The poll also provides valuable insight into how Ivy League professors view their culture and their nation. When asked to pick the best president of the last 40 years, Bill Clinton topped the list with 26 percent of the vote, followed by Kennedy with 17 percent and Johnson with 15 percent. Reagan came in at fifth place with only 4 percent of the Ivy League faculty choosing him as the nation's best chief executive during this period. Predictably, the top half of the list consisted solely of Democrats, with Carter following Johnson in fourth place, while the bottom half selections consisted of the four Republicans who had served as president during the time period specified.

Other cultural indicators of faculty opinion also skewed leftward. Asked to choose whether they agreed more with the editorial page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, the faculty overwhelming chose the Times, 72 percent to 5 percent. Furthermore, 71 percent of the professors disagreed that a liberal bias exists in the news media, and 79 percent labeled President George Bush's political views as "too conservative" compared to 38 percent of the American public who agreed with that assessment.

David Horowitz, President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the organization that commissioned the survey, believes that the poll's results indicate a disturbing conformity in academia. "This survey confirms what I have been saying for years-that our universities are less intellectually free than they were even in the McCarthy era, when I was an Ivy League undergraduate myself," commented Horowitz.

"For all the Ivy League's talk of diversity, it is painfully evident from this survey that there is no real diversity when it comes to the political attitudes and social values of Ivy League professors," Horowitz continued. "Not only is there an alarming uniformity among liberal arts professors at our elite universities, but this uniformity bears the clear stamp of the Democratic Party and the political left."

"It seems like you didn't really need to conduct a study to show that," Lukas Halim, a senior at Yale University, commented on the survey's conclusions. "As a conservative at Yale, I haven't had any trouble finding professors who are sane, though there are a lot of classes that are basically run by lefties and don't hold any interest for conservatives," he told Campus Report. "The results of this poll are very interesting, and I hope that a more extensive study will be done."

The survey polled a total of 151 Ivy League rofessors in a variety of academic fields, including administration, journalism, social science, anthropology, and economics. The poll's margin of error is +/- 8 percent.

"I think if parents saw the political leanings of these professors, they'd be upset," said Frank Luntz, the head of the firm that conducted the survey. "I think universities should insist on the same diversity in their faculty that they look for in their students," he added. "I have a problem when these faculties have no Republican or conservative representation at all."

"I think that the general drift of [the poll] is correct, that there is a left-of-center tendency among Brown faculty, politically, which is not to say that there aren't conservatives, or middle-of-the-roaders, but I think on balance the faculty, politically speaking, is more liberal," Newell Stultz, former chair of the political science department at Brown University told Campus Report. Stultz agreed with the general drift of the study, but disagreed with Horowitz's view that professors' leftist political views filter heavily into the classroom. "On both sides of the equation there's quite a lot of tolerance for people who have different points of view," he said.

"A faculty member who introduces his or her own politics obviously into the subject matter of classroom discussion seems to me to be acting unprofessionally," Stultz continued. "Having said that, I recognize that one's attitudes about these things can scarcely be divorced from what one says. But I think people who try to promote particular points of view, political points of view, I'm not saying this never happens at Brown, but I certainly try not to do it myself and would not approve of others doing it."

Robert Jervis, the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations at Columbia, agreed that the survey's results seemed true to his experience. "The [data from the survey] is certainly plausible. Most professors, certainly in the social sciences, are liberal Democrats," he said.

"I don't consider it healthy that the academy is so different from the general population, but I can't point to specific ways in which I think it is," Jervis added, noting that he can't help but think that a professor's political affiliations has some effect on his research. "I don't think it's minor things, like I make jokes in class about whoever is in power, but probably make more jokes about Republicans than Democrats. But I don't think that makes any difference."

"Harvard University represents a full spectrum of thought which is the basic purpose and goal of a university," Joe Wrinn, a spokesman for Harvard, told Campus Report, disagreeing with Horowitz's conclusion that leftist political ideology has stifled intellectual discussion in the Ivy League. "I would not want to get into labeling faculty as a group nor comment on what their personal or outside affiliations may be because it is their personal business, not ours."

Despite objections to his claim that professors' bias limits discussion on campus, Horowitz maintains that not only is it unethical for universities funded in part by taxpayers to display blatant political bias, but that the monochromatic leftism of the Ivy League undermines the universities' supposed commitment to diversity. Horowitz notes, "It's time for these universities to examine their own injustices and to take seriously their commitment to look like America in all its diverse communities-political, social and religious, as well as ethnic and racial."