Suppose that you start college with a keen interest in physics, and you quickly discover that almost all members of the physics department are Democrats. Would you think that something is wrong? Would your answer be different if your favorite subject is music, chemistry, computer science, anthropology or sociology?
In recent years, concern has grown over what many people see as a left-of-center political bias at colleges and universities. A few months ago, Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, published a study of the political affiliations of faculty members at 51 of the 66 liberal-arts colleges ranked highest by U.S. News in 2017. The findings are eye-popping.
Democrats dominate most fields. In religion, Langbert’s survey found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 70 to 1. In music, it is 33 to 1. In biology, it is 21 to 1. In philosophy, history and psychology, it is 17 to 1. In political science, it is 8 to 1.
The gap is narrower in science and engineering. In physics, economics and mathematics, the ratio is about 6 to 1. In chemistry, it is 5 to 1, and in engineering, it is just 1.6 to 1. Still, Langbert found no field in which Republicans are more numerous than Democrats.
True, these figures do not include the many professors who do not have a political affiliation. And, true, the ratios vary dramatically across colleges.
None of the 51 colleges had more Republicans than Democrats.
But despite the variability, none of the 51 colleges had more Republicans than Democrats. According to the survey, more than one-third of them had no Republicans at all.
For two reasons, these numbers, and others like them, are genuinely disturbing.
The first involves potential discrimination on the part of educational institutions. Some departments might be disinclined to hire potential faculty members based on their political convictions.
Such discrimination might take the form of unconscious devaluation of people whose views do not fit with the dominant perspective. For example, young historians who cast Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in a terrible light might not get a lot of job offers. And talented people might not pursue academic careers at all, because they expect that their potential professors will not appreciate their work.
The second reason is that students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy. Students and faculty might end up in a kind of information cocoon. If a political science department consists of 24 Democrats and two Republicans, we have reason to doubt that students will be exposed to an adequate range of views.
It is true that in some fields, political affiliations do not matter. In chemistry, math, physics and engineering, students should not care about the party affiliations of their professors.
The real problems arise in subjects such as history, political science, philosophy and psychology, where the professor’s political perspective might well make a difference. (The same is true of law.)
If academic hiring is skewed along ideological lines, the march toward uniformity might be self-reinforcing. Prospective professors will have an incentive to adopt the prevailing orthodoxy (or to speak and write as if they do).
John Stuart Mill put it well: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
Cass R. Sunstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
This is a terrible article, completely off base on analyzing the facts. Rather than taking the low effort route by simply showing the breakdown between Democrats and Republicans per academic discipline and lamenting the existence of bias, Sunstein should have delved into analyzing WHY this situation exists.
The word university is derived from the word “universe” and its association with a sense of large, openness and expanding. In discussing this openness concept let me refer to a seminal book on the subject authored by Milton Rokeach, “The Open and Closed Mind”, 1960. Among many other observations, Rokeach clearly shows that having an open mind is a prerequisite to creativity. Republicans, especially Conservatives, regularly score low on the creativity scale. It explains why over the last 100 years, most new and creative initiatives – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights, Voter Rights, etc. – are products of Democrats and not Republicans who regularly show more resistance to change.
This notion also supports the correlation between the degree of creativity in each discipline and the ratio of Democrats to Republicans per discipline -33 to 1 in music and just 1,6 in Engineering. It may also explain why both Hollywood and Broadway, fields which require high creativity, lean Democratic. Finally, in academia the dichotomy is not between Democrats and Republicans but rather between the open mind and the closed mind and we should be thankful that our colleges are dominated not by Democrats, but professors with open minds.
Since Sustein closed the article with a quote from John Stuart Mill, I will use another quote from Mill to close this response – “Not all Conservatives are stupid, but all the stupid people I know are Conservative.”