It should come as no surprise that an overwhelming majority of full-time Ph.D. professors at liberal arts colleges are Democrats. A new study is now showing just that.
Sampling 8,688 “tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report,” Brooklyn College’s Mitchell Langbert found that 78 percent of the academic departments in the sample have no Republicans employed.
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While not surprising, this political homogeneity should be alarming. A lack of balance among educators in colleges greatly deprives students of viewpoint diversity, and ultimately cheapens academia by only providing students with one main avenue of thought.
Langbert references author George Yancey’s Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education, writing that “sociologists prefer not to work with fundamentalists, evangelicals, National Rifle Association members, and Republicans.” The left-wing biases that many students experience in liberal arts schools lead them to believe that conservatism is a “deviant” line of thinking, despite the fact that more Americans identify as conservative than liberal.
This concern for proliferating academic biases isn’t unfounded. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, a greater amount of college graduates are flocking to the Democratic Party than in the last quarter of a century. Fifty-eight percent of college graduates have begun leaning toward the Left, while those with no college education continue to lean toward the Right.
Coincidence? Maybe, but probably not.
College students who are inundated with a one-sided education, whether blatantly or subliminally, are being affected. Liberal arts colleges that staff overwhelming numbers of Democrats are doing a great disservice to their students by refusing to provide them with professors who hold a wide range of ideals and personal convictions.
It is only through learning all facets of an argument that students can learn to think and discern for themselves. The danger is that liberal arts colleges may be doing less educating and empowering, and are instead churning out robotic graduates who regurgitate liberal ideology that they have been indoctrinated with for four years.
Based on the study’s results, there is concern that such liberal bias is too embedded in the college culture to even allow for reform.
“The solution to viewpoint homogeneity may lie in establishing new colleges from the ground up,” Langbert writes.
For the sake of a more balanced academic structure, this approach may be worth considering. How else do you diversify a well-established, entrenched, elitist culture such as this 78 percent homogeneous thinking in academia?
