Friday, April 20, 2018

Homogeneity: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts Faculty

My new article just published in Academic Questions  looks at 51 of the top-66 liberal arts colleges. The findings may be unsurprising, but they are startling. The paper extends and amplifies an earlier paper by Dan Klein, Tony Quain, and me.  
If the military colleges (West Point and Annapolis) are excluded, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in elite liberal arts colleges--including places like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Colby, and Trinity--is 12.7:1, even higher than the social science departments at elite research universities. If the two military colleges are included, the ratio falls to 10.4:1. 

However, the fields differ sharply. The hard science fields like engineering, chemistry and math; the professional fields like business; and the hard social science fields of economics and political science have D:R ratios closer to the baseline of a Democratic-to-Republican ratio of 1.6:1 than do the soft social sciences and humanities. The interdisciplinary studies fields (women’s studies, Black studies, gender studies, and so on) have a ratio of 108:0.

78.2 percent of the academic departments in the liberal arts colleges have 0 Republicans; that is, only 21.8 percent of the academic departments among the top liberal arts colleges include one or more Republican. As well, zero falls within the margin of error in 20 of 51 or 39.2 percent of the colleges. In other words, in 39.2 percent of the 51 colleges, there is no statistical difference between the proportion of Republicans and zero.

Besides sharp differences across fields of study, there are sharp differences among colleges. Bryn Mawr and Soka, a Buddhist college in California, have D:R ratios of 72:0 and 20:0. The military colleges have ratios of 2.3:1 and 1.3:1. For one small, conservative Catholic college, Thomas Aquinas, I could find no Democrats. In other words, institutional differences in the forms of the field and the college make a big difference as to how left-slanted college faculties are.

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