Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill may take a class without ever having a Republican professor to challenge their views or provide them with another perspective.
According to research from The College Fix, for every Republican professor, UNC-Chapel Hill has 12 Democratic professors.
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Of the 1,355 professors, 615 were registered Democrats, 299 were unaffiliated, 291 could not be found in the database, 98 could not be determined, 50 were Republicans, and two were Libertarians.
Where Republicans did exist, including the 21 in the Global Business Center, they were still outnumbered. The center has 41 Democrats.
Sixteen departments, about half of the 34 on campus, have no Republicans.
University Spokesperson Jim Gregory told The College Fix that the university “does not hire faculty based upon their political affiliation, but instead upon academic merit.”
“We also feel that it is important for students to be confronted with views that they may not agree with or have not previously been exposed to, which we believe leads to the development of critical thinking skills,” he said. However, what the school feels “is important” may not be possible thanks to the political imbalance.
Gregory admitted it’s “extremely difficult” to achieve a perfect balance “of diversity across all domains.”
In March, leftist students at UNC couldn’t handle hearing a conservative viewpoint and staged a walkout during a speech from Ben Shapiro.
The pattern is not unique to UNC. President Jenna Robinson of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy said that the findings are “in keeping with what I’ve seen in the Pope Center’s work and in similar studies at other universities.”
While she doesn’t think hire committees discriminate “in most cases,” she said that “in some departments, it probably does happen. There are certain fields in which only leftist orthodoxy seems to be permitted.”
Cornell University, where 96 percent of the faculty donations go to Democrats, has professors who suggest that hiring more Republicans would decrease the quality of their faculty.
The lack of Republican professors at UNC — or any other university — is not surprising. Conservatives are often lacking where they’re needed most and it’s more difficult for them to earn tenure. While they can be severely punished for communicating their views, liberal professors are given pay raises, even as they condemn Republicans.
