A Closer Look at Academia’s Political Diversity

In elite universities across America, liberal faculty members overwhelmingly outnumber their conservative counterparts. This comes as no surprise: American academia has long been disproportionately liberal compared with the American electorate. In 1969, only a quarter of professors were found to be even moderately conservative.

In recent years, however, this ideological imbalance has become even more pronounced. According to faculty studies conducted by the Carnegie Commission National Survey of Higher Education, “between 1969 and 1998, the share of faculty identifying as ‘liberal’ or ‘far-left’ shifted only a tenth of a percentage point, from 44.7 percent to 44.8 percent.”

The UCLA-HERI faculty survey shows a much more significant shift movement toward the left in recent years. Between 2001 and 2015, the share of professors that identified as liberal increased by roughly 12 percentage points. More recent decades have featured a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of around 11:1.