alt Hacker News> when partisanship has to be disguised.
The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Langbert notes:
> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.
Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su...
> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”
Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep...
> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
Replies
Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itself.
> The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities
Yes - and? Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poets, small Business owners, baristas , farmers, CxOs, software engineers tend to lean one way or another on average. The battle is not to establish political neutrality everywhere, but selective against universities because the staff & students leans left. I'm yet to hear conservatives complain about the political bias in the Fraternal Order of Police or the FBI.
Looking at history, every nascent autocracy takes aim at independent intellectuals, like clockwork. First to be neutralized is the opposition, then the press, then the intellectuals in higher education.