by Christopher Chow

A new study by the American Enterprise Institute reports that there is a large disparity between conservative and liberal faculty on campus.

National election results for the past forty years demonstrate that Americans are rather evenly divided between liberal and conservative party lines. The 2000 presidential election resulted in each major candidate receiving forty-eight percent of the popular vote. Four years before that, Bill Clinton was reelected by a margin of nine percent. Elections considered to be landslides in American politics such as Lyndon Johnson's 1964 election victory over Barry Goldwater show the winner with only sixty-one percent of the vote and the loser receiving thirty-nine percent. A new study of the party affiliations of college professors proves a massive gulf between Right and Left. Liberal professors often outnumber conservatives by ten to one and sometimes by more than twenty to one on campus.

"Today's colleges and universities are not, to use the current buzzword, 'diverse' places. Quite the opposite: They are virtual one-party states, ideological monopolies, badly unbalanced ecosystems. They are utterly flightless birds with only one wing to flap. They do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America," concludes the study.

Volunteers for the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture investigated Board of Elections' records in the locales of nineteen of the nation's most prestigious colleges to examine the political party registrations of the professors at the schools. Professors were classified as "liberal" if they were registered with the Democratic Party, Green Party, or Working Family Party. Professors in the Republican Party or Libertarian Party were classified as "conservative."

Eli Lehrer, who conducted the study, told Campus Report, "We sent students in each of the colleges to their local Boards of Elections and had them get lists of the faculty members and look up registration cards. Now, this only works in the states where you register by party and where voter records are public.... We tried to get a good sample of colleges."

The professors were categorized by their academic departments, such as political science, economics, journalism, English, history, and sociology. "Lest critics accuse us of cherry-picking only fringe disciplines, we have stuck mostly to major, uncontroversial, and socially significant fields of study," states the report.

The study concluded, "Colleges like to characterize themselves as wide-open places where every thought can be thought, where any opinion can be held, where all ideals and principles may be pursued freely. The demonstrable reality, however, is that you will find a much wider-and freer-cross-section of human reasoning and conviction in the aisles of a grocery store or city bus."

Liberals outnumber conservatives 18 to one at Brown University. At Cornell University, the number is even higher, with liberals outnumbering conservatives more than 26 times. Penn State displayed a bit more balance, with the ratio of liberals to conservatives being six to one. Even the smallest disparity, at the University of Houston, had a ratio of three liberals to one conservative.

Of the 166 professors examined at Cornell University, only six were conservatives, with no conservatives at all in the fields of history and sociology. There were likewise no conservatives in these fields at Brown University.

Some of the largest disparities were found in the University of California system. UCLA, for instance, has only nine conservatives for 141 liberals. UC-Santa Barbara had only one conservative professor in the 73 examined. At the four UC schools surveyed, there were only five conservative political science professors compared to 90 liberals.

At UC-Berkeley, only seven of the 66 professors noted were conservatives, with none in the department of sociology. "It's not surprising to a lot of the more conservative students on campus because you often find classes where it seems very apparent," the editor-in-chief of Berkeley's student newspaper The California Patriot, James Gallagher, told Campus Report. "The problem is, a professor has the right to be in any party, ideology they want to be. But when they let ideology come over into their teaching that's when we have a problem.... Because there is such a bias, because there are so many professors who do identify with more of the Left that you have a lot of professors out there who let their ideology interfere with how they teach a class. That's not really learning, that's not really seeking any truth."

"Conservatives are exposed to [prejudice] because we are a minority. And as a minority you just have to be prepared to defend yourself," Berkeley Political Science Professor A. James Gregor told Campus Report. He thinks that conservative professors are a "minority" and that in his own experience Berkeley has gone out of its way to attract liberal professors. "All these things I think are in-house problems in any academic institution. Most of conservatives are located in the natural sciences because they don't have to deal with popular opinions, prejudices, and so forth. In the talky, chatty sciences, you find liberal thought."

Professor Gregor believes that this political bias has generated a loss of respect for academe. "You know how Americans are, they mostly dismiss academics. They just simply say, 'Well, what do you expect from academics?' Ten miles from Berkeley people say, 'Oh, Berkeley; what do you expect from that place?' It's a trifle bizarre and everybody knows it. We have naked students walking on campus to test the limits of their civil rights. It's an outdoor lunatic asylum. And I think most people outside of academe treat it that way."

Extreme liberal bias was found even in states generally thought to be conservative, such as Colorado. Colorado's governor, its senators, and four of its congressmen are Republican, as are many of the voters in the state. Yet, Republicans constitute a fringe group at the University of Colorado, a state-funded school. In fact, the University of Colorado was one of the most liberal schools of those surveyed, with liberal professors outnumbering conservative professors by more than 23 to one. An earlier, more comprehensive study conducted by the Rocky Mountain News found a 31 to one Democrat to Republican imbalance among faculty at the school. Lehrer told Campus Report he didn't expect the divide to be so great in traditionally conservative states. "We had data from Cornell and Stanford and looking at it I thought maybe people were registered as Democrats just because those are Democratic towns and you'll often register in a party that has a lot of people in it."

Lehrer told Campus Report that he was surprised by just how vast the political divide was. "I was a little bit surprised. I really didn't expect it to be as unbalanced throughout the country."

Brown University's Political Science department's chairman, Allen Zuckerman, denied that there was any bias in the hiring process at Brown. "There are two issues here. The criteria for employment and the issue of the political views of the faculty. The association is to my mind nonexistent. It may be that faculty tilt toward the liberal end but that has nothing to do with why they have been hired," Zuckerman told Campus Report. "I've been at Brown for thirty years. There are all kinds of reasons that go into searches. Political views to my knowledge have never entered into it. Now maybe the pool of candidates suddenly tilted to the liberal end of the spectrum, but that particular issue never comes up."