Debunking Charlie Kirk (and PragerU) on liberal professors

Kirk stars in a PragerU video titled “The Least Diverse Place in America” posted on the organization’s Youtube page in April 2017.

Its main claim is that universities, while being diverse in many other areas, are not “intellectually” diverse or don’t have what Kirk calls “diversity of thought.”

There are some highly charged claims associated with this main one that are bombastic such as orientation week starts your stay in an “indoctrination center” or that people expressing different points of view on a college campus today is “dangerous” if those views are not on “the left.”

Let’s fact-check the main fact for this main claim.

“Almost all your professors on the left.”

As the video notes, this comes from the Econ Journal Watch, a journal funded and hosted by the The Fraser Institute, a Canadian libertarian think tank.

Two professors published a study in the September 2016 issue of the journal looking at the voter registration of professors in the “40 top universities” in the US and concluded that “the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans” is 11.5:1.

The study looked at more than 7,200 professors in these fields: Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law, and Psychology. It found 3,623 professors to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, with the most “Democratic” field to be History (33.5:1) and the most “mixed” to be Economics (4.5:1). Insidehighered did a story. And the authors provide more links to other sources here.

Context here is important and left out by Kirk in the video. For one, as the right-leaning Heterodox Academy points out, the biggest ratios exists at the most selective universities, the Ivies and similar ones. The schools with the more “mixed” faculty are large, state research universities.

Another limitation to the study was the lack of public voter registration records in 20 states, including mine (Georgia), and some GOP bastions such as Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. While there are “blue” cities in these states, a less Northeast regional selection by the study’s authors might have changed the outcomes.

But one key part of the study weakens Kirk’s main conclusion of a “liberal” academy: the ratio of registered to non-registered professors.

For example, the №1 university in the nation, Princeton, had 89 Democrats to 3 Republicans, but there were 64 professors not registered and 25 not “affiliated” with any party (individuals who are registered but not officially associated with a party). That 89 matches the number of Democrats in the department. That ratio — registered to unregistered — is even worse at Harvard, №2. See below for more data.

In short, the numbers below suggest not a “liberal” academy but a politically uninterested or disinterested one, or one where a party label, sometimes required to vote in a primary, is a turn-off to professors. With the polarization of the nation, this also suggests moderates can’t in good conscience take on either of the two major labels.

And the study breaks down this ratio by discipline, too.

While the registered professors skew Democratic, in Economics you see more non-registered than Democrats.

Other studies show a less than dominating “liberal” academy. One study looked at voter registration at 11 California universities, ranging from small, private, religiously affiliated institutions to large, public,and elite schools.

According to the abstract:

“At one end of the scale, U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9:1, while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic field also makes a tremendous difference, with the humanities averaging a 10:1 D:R ratio and business schools averaging 1.3:1, and with departments ranging from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1). Across all departments and institutions, the D:R ratio is 5:1, while in the ‘soft’ liberal‐arts fields, the ratio is higher than 8:1. These findings are generally in line with comparable previous studies.”

It should be noted that the two most “mixed” disciplines in this study — management and business— were not in the Econ Journal Watch study.

According to InsideHigherEd, the “most complete” study on this issue was published in 2007. IHE also ran a story on the study when it initially appeared.

First, the study was “unusual among such research efforts in that it included community college faculty members (who are left out of many such analyses) and looked at age and positions on social issues.”

Some of its key findings:

• Faculty members were more likely to categorize themselves as moderate (46.1 percent) than liberal (44.1 percent). Conservatives trailed at 9.2 percent.
• Faculty members, when examined by sector, differed widely. At community colleges, 19 percent of faculty members called themselves conservatives, and only 37.1 percent said they were liberals. Liberal arts college faculty members were most likely to identify as liberal (61 percent, compared to only 3.9 percent as conservatives).
• The professors approaching their emeritus years were significantly to the left of those coming into academe. Among those aged 50–64, 17.2 percent identified themselves as left activists, while only 1.3 percent of those aged 26–35 did so.

Furthermore, one of the authors of the 2007 survey wrote a 2016 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times debunking Kirk’s implied thesis, that liberal professors mean liberal indoctrination in the classroom. The author wrote instead: “Just because most professors are liberal doesn’t mean the average student is being force-fed liberal ideology.” [I also debunked that claim in Turning Point’s publication.]

His evidence? “In the social sciences and humanities, where political views are more relevant, I found very few academics whose stated goal was to sway students to their side of the political aisle. The vast majority of professors focus on teaching students the subject matter of their fields as well as basic skills such as analytical reading, writing and critical thinking. If current events do come up in classroom discussions, the usual pattern is for professors to promote what they see as open conversation.”

Also debunking Kirk’s implication is a self-described professor “rare breed: a conservative Republican who twice voted for George W. Bush. I supported the invasion of Iraq, and I deeply admire Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas for their originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution.”

Matthew Woessner writes in the AAUP publication Academe in 2012 that “whereas my conservative colleagues tend to portray academia as rife with partisan conflict, my research into the impact of politics in higher education tells a different story. Although the Right faces special challenges in higher education, our research offers little evidence that conservative students or faculty are the victims of widespread ideological persecution.”

The professor tells the story of his undergraduate years as a conservative, trying to avoid more “liberal” or even Marxist-inclined professors:

“I recall that as a naive sophomore I enrolled in an introductory sociology course and was surprised that the professor was an avowed Marxist. Concerned that our ideological perspectives might ultimately affect my course grade, I tried unsuccessfully to lay low. However, noting that I cringed as she denounced Reagan’s economic policies, the professor asked if I had a different take on the issue. Somewhat reluctantly, I offered a defense of Reaganomics. To her credit, she listened attentively and, as far as I could tell, took my novel ideas seriously. In light of the fact that, by her own admission, she had never heard a spirited defense of conservative economic policies, it became clear to me that sociology was an ideological minefield. I never enrolled in another sociology course for the rest of my academic career.”

Yet now as a professor he sees the error of his ways, ways that mirror the stories in Turning Point’s publication I fact-checked in another essay.

The professor writes: “While the experience in one or two introductory courses may be a poor proxy for the ideological tenor of a major, it seems probable that conservative students use this type of snap judgment in charting their academic course.”

And his solution to the problem Kirk highlights? “Nevertheless, one potentially important way of improving the Right’s representation in academia is to stop overstating the challenges conservatives face on campus. By promoting their peculiar brand of right-wing victimization, activists run the risk of exacerbating academia’s political imbalance by needlessly discouraging conservatives from considering careers in higher education.”