Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Overwhelming liberal bias in the university and liberal faculty members

A new study of the ideology of university faculty reaffirms why there is an overwhelming liberal bias in academia. The study was done by two professors at Harvard and George Mason University of 1417 full-time professors.

What did they find?

*Only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives.
*The lowest number of conservative faculty members is at liberal arts colleges only 3.9%, highest at community colleges 19.0% (Those bastions of conservatism.)
*Only 20.4% of college instructors voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
*75% of college faculty members agree that “abortion should be legal if a
woman wants it for any reason.”
*Faculty members are most left on gender, sexuality, and foreign policy issues.
*Conservatives are rarest in the humanities (3.6 percent) and social sciences (4.9 percent), and most common in the health sciences (20.5 percent) and business (24.5 percent).

Mr. Larry Summers, who was formerly President of Harvard and is now a university professor at Harvard said, "It made me think that there is even less ideological diversity in the American university than I had imagined. There is an overwhelming tilt toward the progressive side. Compared to the under representation of other groups whose under representation is often stressed, the under representation of conservatives appears to be rather substantially more, perhaps.”

Probably the most intolerant institutions for the free exchange of ideas and the place which should be the most tolerant is the modern secular university.

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