Peeking Through The Ivory Curtain

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Really, the Left dominates academia in America to a degree that they never could in the former Soviet Union. More than a decade ago, the then-president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Roger Bowen said, in a debate at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), “I reject the notion of academia as monolithic.”

“We’re very diverse,” he said in a debate at the American Enterprise Institute. “We’re very disputatious.” He added, with a straight face: “We’ve got moderate Democrats. We’ve got liberal Democrats.”

Actually, you’re lucky if you can find that much diversity in academia. “The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic,” Michael Langbert writes in an article distributed by the National Association of Scholars (NAS). “Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.”

“The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.”

“My sample of 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 consists of 5,197, or 59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis.1 If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.”