Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Still More on Campus Intellectual Diversity:
The [1]Dartmouth Review has done a study of party affiliation of
Dartmouth's professors and the results are unsurprising:
With these statistics in mind, The Dartmouth Review decided to
revisit its investigation of the political affiliations of
professors on our own campus. The results were not all that
surprising: of the 341 professors registered to vote in Hanover,
NH, Lebanon, NH, and Norwich, VT, 225 (66 percent) are Democrats
and eighteen (5 percent) are Republicans. Ninety-eight (29 percent)
did not register a party. Put another way, there are 12.5
registered Democrats for every registered Republican.
Moreover, since we last collected this same information, several
professors have changed their affiliation to Democratic, presumably
to vote in last year�s presidential primary. None became
Republicans.
When the Center for the Study of Popular Culture conducted a
narrower study in 2002, it found that there were 38 Democrats and
four Republicans in the eight Dartmouth academic departments it
examined. Now, according to The Review�s study of Hanover, Lebanon
and Norwich voters, these departments contain 70 Democrats and
still only four Republicans.
An interesting anecdote from the article:
No Republican professor teaches in interdisciplinary departments,
and many teach in very narrow fields, such as engineering or
mathematics, which are not likely to attract non-majors, thus
limiting their influence and profile on campus. Conservatives might
anticipate safety within fields in which politics should have no
bearing, but even the computer science department includes a
professor who uses text in programming classes to praise Democrats
and condemn President George W. Bush.
Prior research by [2]Dan Klein and the most recent article by
[3]Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte has identified a very high
correlation between party affiliation and views on ideological and
political issues, so although imperfect, party affiliation in fact
turns out to be a pretty useful proxy for intellectual viewpoints.
References
1.
http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/so_many_democrats_so_little_time.php
2. http://lsb.scu.edu/~dklein/survey/survey.htm
3. http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2/
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