Tuesday, October 01, 2002

Fighting Diversity in Higher Education

The freedom-loving kids at Bureaucrash have highlighted some interesting facts about political diversity in higher education. It seems that the faculty at elite universities are overwhelmingly leftists. I know, what else is new? But having the voter registration numbers to prove it is an interesting development. The American Enterprise conducted the research, labeling Democrats, Greens, and Working Family party members as on the Left, leaving registered Republicans and Libertarians to represent the Right. Walter Williams recently summarized the results in Insight magazine:

“The results? At Brown University, 5 percent of the faculty were members of the party of the right; at Cornell it was 3 percent; Harvard, 4 percent; Penn State, 17 percent; Stanford, 11 percent; the University of California at Los Angeles, 6 percent; and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, 1 percent. There are other universities in the survey; however, the pattern is the same - the faculty is dominated by leftist ideology. In some departments, such as women's studies, African-American studies, political science, sociology, history and English, the entire faculty is leftist. When it came to the 2000 presidential election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader. Zinsmeister concludes that one would find much greater political diversity at a grocery store or on a city bus.”

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