UNC-Chapel Hill A One-Party State

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Stalin couldn’t find this kind of plurality in the old Soviet Union. He at least had Leon Trotsky to contend with.

“UNC-Chapel Hill ranks ahead of liberal stalwarts Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, Duke, and UC-Berkeley in one category: the percentage of liberal arts faculty registered as Democrats,” UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Michael Jacobs wrote in the Raleigh News & Observer on April 26, 2018. “In 1970, Democrat voter registration among university faculty across the country outnumbered Republicans by 3.5 to one.”

“Nationally, that disparity has soared to 11 to 1. At UNC, there are 23 registered Democrats for every Republican in the departments that address political and social issues, according to Econ Journal Watch.”

The Econ Journal Watch survey is actually from September 2016 but we haven’t seen an avalanche of conservatives falling on academia since then, in or out of the tarheel state. Moreover, given the trends Jacobs enumerates, we are more likely to have seen even more of an exodus, at least by way of attrition via retirements and mortality.

In the Econ Journal Watch, Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein studied 40 universities. “We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1,” they wrote in their abstract. “The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1, History 33.5:1, Journalism/Communications 20.0:1, Law 8.6:1, and Psychology 17.4:1.”

“The results indicate that D:R ratios have increased since 2004, and the age profile suggests that in the future they will be even higher.”

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