In the LA Times today there was (as part of a larger discussion; see the longer post to follow) a set of data about the increase of the proportion of people with left-leaning political views on American University Campuses. I comment about it in the other post, but there are some interesting features which bear discussing outside of that context. First, the data:
Among faculties
Academics who identified themselves as left or liberal
• in 1984 39%
• in 1999 72%Academics who identified themselves as right or conservative
• in 1984 34%
• in 1999 15%Among campus faculties in 1999, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 5 to 1
The Democratic advantage by department in 1999
• English: 35 to 1
• History: 17.5 to 1
• Biology: 4 to 1
• Engineering: 3 to 1
• Computer science: 2 to 1
• Chemistry: 1.5 to 1
• But in agriculture, Republicans held a 1.3 to 1 edge.In 2004, employees of the University of California and Harvard University were John Kerry’s largest dollar contributors and among Howard Dean’s top five.
That was for faculty. The first thing I wanted to know when I saw these numbers was why there were not any numbers for Physics or Mathematics! Also, what does this mean, exactly? Is it that the scientists and engineers are not reporting accurately, or is there really something going on here that means that there are fewer “left-leaning” people in thsoe groups. Or is it that people in English and History are more politically active or aware? I’ve not got a clue, but these data are certainly very interesting, don’t you think?
Here are some interesting (less dramatic, to my mind) numbers for students:
Among students,
Incoming freshmen who identified themselves as left or liberal
• in 1984 22%
• in 2004 30%Incoming freshmen who identified themselves as right or conservative
• in 1984 21%
• in 200424%
(In both cases: Sources: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1984); Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte (1999); Harris Poll (1984, 2004); Center for Responsive Politics (2004); Higher Education Research Institute (2004).)
What I would have found much more interesting for the latter set of figures (perhaps the data are not available….that’s a study that should be done…..does any one know?) is a survey of those same students when they leave university four years later. Are they more or less Democrat or Republican than when they left?
What about you? If you went to college, did your political leanings (if you had any) change in any way? Which way? Why and how was this change brought about (e.g, passionate debate; it was cool; the meetings were an opportunity to meet the hot chicks/dudes….etc) ? Is it really the case that Science and Engineering people are less polarised, or is there something skewing the data?
I’ll take cover and let you have your say.
-cvj
January 22nd, 2006 at 5:51 pm
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January 22nd, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Quick sixties era version:i started out a staunch conservative attending UCLA on a full-ride scholarship from the US Navy. I majored in History, particularly US military history (the Navy mostly) and lettered in water polo and swimming. Quite literally “the ‘Bus’ came by and i got on, and that is when it all began.” I participated in a food throwing protest against the “hippy” “freespeech” activists; and then, a very short time later, i was invited to ‘pass the acid test.’ My entire personal and academic philosophy changed overnight. I changed my focus to the history and philosophy of religions (esp American Indians) and rejected all of my conservative views as unenlightened and misinformed. I went on into graduate school as a part-time social justice activist (AIM and environment) and part-time academic. Neither my activism nor my ideological views have slackened in nearly 40 years. Now retired i am free from constraints of public pronouncements of my political views.
January 22nd, 2006 at 7:03 pm
it is nice to see your historical perspective injected spyder. Sort of high’s and lows of it’s time.
Now we see how things are sorted out to the left and right of us, that if we are not one, we are the other?
What if you didn’t hold to this kind of political system, but saw it as a “capitalistic” or as a “socialistic one”. You might be branded a communist( age ole thinking), yet these would be absent from any overview of society involved. Just a caring based one, that recognized the plight of different generations over time.
Would one be then called a lefty? Dumb Foreigners, hey?
January 22nd, 2006 at 7:24 pm
One simple observation, in my mind big part of these numbers is the change of what it means to be left-leaning over the years. I suspect that many long-time republicans suddenly found themselves left-leaning recently, but that is just an acceleration of a long trend.
January 22nd, 2006 at 7:26 pm
35 to 1 in english is shocking. 17.5 to 1 in history is about what I expected, coming from Yale, where the history department is famously conservative with a democrat/repub ratio of maybe 4:1. I’m surprised that the numbers for techical fields are so much lower. Assuming that physics is somewhere around biology, engineering, and cs, that puts us in the range of 2:1 to 5:1. Even 5:1 is way lower than I would expect from personal experience! Hanging around physics departments, I hear so many jokes about Bush and repbulicans, that would be offensive even to thoughtful conservatives, not just in the halls but also in classes and even colloquia (Wilczek’s recent talk springs to mind…) that I always assumed it was at *least* 95% liberal. If it’s really more like 80% then there are some serious closet conservatives in these departments! Either that or all the conservatives are at less well-known universities.
January 22nd, 2006 at 8:31 pm
I probably know more than a hundred astrophysicists, and I have never met a conservative. Other than myself, of course. Speaking from personal experience, life at the university has served as anti-indoctrination, efficiently cultivating within me a healthy disdain for the left. I was dismissed as a bleeding-heart by my conservative prep school classmates, but college, grad school and academia could not have done a better job of turning me into a Righty if they had all been assembled for the express purpose of achieving that very goal. Who needs an Academic Bill of Rights? Who cares about balanced education? By all means, keep shoving hatred of America, hatred of Israel, hatred of capitalism and hatred of God down the throats of your students, and you will create an insurmountable grassroots conservative base that will govern this country for the next fifty years.
January 22nd, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Moshe makes a good point. The right has managed to redefine the center, moving it further and further right, so that more people automatically become left of center without ever changing their politics.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:37 pm
I’m a physicist, and I’ve met plenty of conservative physicists. However, disliking Bush and his cronies hardly marks someone as a liberal. I voted Republican in every Presidential election for over half a century until 2004. Bush 2 isn’t the same type of Republican that Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush 1 were.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:43 pm
I kind of find that most physicists are essentially apolitical. There are some that loosely follow politics, and fewer that closely follow them, but if you took a poll over who Jack Abramhoff’s primary clients were, for example, or what year Newt Gingrich became speaker of the house after a massive Republican electoral takeover, I’d bet that you get about 30% (amongst those with US citizenship) getting both of those questions right. There are certainly more lefties than righties, but I would argue that a lot of that support for the left stems from a couple of issues, one of which is the right’s anti-science stance.
January 22nd, 2006 at 11:12 pm
If conservative blogs are any indication, the business of conservatives is a preoccupation with the timeless rectitude of their world and views which they wish to see conserved. Academics are supposed to ask difficult questions and be critical of conventional wisdoms. I really don’t need to go to school to learn how wonderful is my church country race and etc.
January 23rd, 2006 at 12:56 am
Disclaimer: I’m Finnish, so you might want to do reinterpret my “right” and “left” as “left” and “more left” =)
Here engineering has somewhat of a Right bias and other (less technical or theoretical) fields are seen somewhat more leftist, sort of confirming the numbers presented above. It doesn’t really matter, though. Most people spend their youth by being young and quite apolitical.
But how I’ve changed during the years? Ah, that’s a difficult question. As a freshman, I was a bleeding heart leftie. I must now admit that it was mostly due to not thinking about the issues. With some friends we had debates and discussions and all that stuff, and slowly we gained a better understanding of the Big Picture.
If you’d try to guess my orientation by my values, I’d be very decidedly a liberal. After all, I am an atheist, I support equality of all people fully, I care for the environment and so on. Yet when talking about fiscal policies, I am often a mirror image of what the left views should be. (But not to the point of being an actual American Republican — My government would need at least a small bay to be drowned in.)
In all fairness, the political spectrum should be at least a plane. Otherwise it is impossible to map at least my trajectory in a satisfactory manner.
“It’s heartless to be a righty when you’re young, but irrational to be a lefty when you’re old”
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:16 am
Echoing bittergradstudent, most of the biogeeks I know have rather aloof political attitudes. Either that, or they’re expats (usually from East or South Asia) and regard our political system with more than a little bemusement. The religious stuff especially just baffles the a lot of the Chinese and Japanese folks, and they otherwise dance all over the line between Left and Right on the remaining secular concerns, most shockingly at times when it comes to civil liberties and some ideals of equality.
Anyway, getting back to the born-and-bred Americans, I’d be very curious to see how many people could not be counted in the poll because they answered “none of the above” or “don’t know and/or care”.
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
I suspect that someone who actually buys the “hatred of America, hatred of Israel, hatred of capitalism and hatred of God” rhetoric probably didn’t need much help from the left to become a conservative. A more accurate description of the views of most liberals I know would be “hatred of the misrepresentation that America stands for bullying and torture, hatred of the idea that the Palestinians are subhuman and Israel should have carte blanche (oops, that’s French), hatred of the notion that destruction of the environment and child labor are ok in the name of capitalism, and hatred of the attempts of members of a certain religion to impose their will on everyone else and to ignore science and common sense.”
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Being a dual major in history and physics, I do find that college students from one discipline want nothing to do with any of the others. This is understandable, for physics does take up a lot of my life, but I follow, sometimes obsessively current events. I must disagree with bittergrad in that most physicists in academia would learn liberal politically and social, but also have a blanket disgust for politics in general.
Prof. Emeritus John Stachel, whose focus is General Relativity, can always be counted on to start off a talk with a call to arms against political foes. He is an academic marxist, so a bit expected. Another prof during our advanced lab class groused about how the money we spend in one month in Iraq could have gotten the SuperConducting SuperCollider built and running.
Scientists want to do science, and I don’t believe any practicing researcher likes the beaucracy that comes with grant requests, federal agencies, and university deans. Also, as a question to those science students and professionals here, does it seem the government or the American public appreciates or cares about the work of scientists other then how it can advance their mobile or tv or health?
And to end on a historical note, let scientists remember the moral incredulity of Heisenberg, Planck and Von Weiszacker during WWII, where they colluded with an obhorent regime premised on the grounds of saving Physics in Germany and that they were apolitical.
One detest politics, but no scientist should resign himself to being “apolitical!”
January 23rd, 2006 at 3:49 pm
I’m a physics grad student at Berkeley and have had quite a meandering political stance over the years. I went into undergrad (at the University of Illinois) with a liberal stance on most things, but I was relatively apolitical. In my first year I became a staunch objectivist, but that may have been because they “got to me” first. After a while, that decayed and I managed to swing to the other side and become a relative “bleeding heart” liberal. That has been tempered somewhat since being at Berkeley. It may be a result of seeing the most radical part of the left side up close and how the far-left ignores rational thought just as much as the far-right.
All in all, I’d say my political stance was never directly influenced by professors either in physics or other classes. I was never taken in by a charismatic professor spewing objectivist rhetoric; I tried to analyze the issues myself and with friends. While I agree with most people in my department on political issues, I find the blatant jokes at the expense of the right to be inappropriate at times because it marginalizes these views. I can imagine the same sort of jokes being made at Bob Jones University at the expense of us “lefties”. The UCLA alumni hunt for liberals is discouraging and wrong, but I can understand how people who hold those views can feel persecuted.
January 23rd, 2006 at 5:06 pm
This has been a sort of amusement to me. In southern Germany I’m left-center, in southern France I’m center-right, in the UK definit left and in the US I’d be bleeding heart liberal.
How did things change? A bit all over the place, though always with a left tendency. I guess it is natural that as we grow older our opinions become more sophisticated and fit less and less into the left/right spectrum.
Did Profs/Uni play a role? Not one bit. Then again University in Germany is quite a different beast from the UK/US so that’s perhaps unsurprising.
January 23rd, 2006 at 7:45 pm
Echoing Doran:
Being “aloof” does not necessarily mean that one does not hold a strong political belief though. It just means they rather prefer not to talk about it openly. At this moment in time, I think it’s hard to find someone who is “apolitical”.
January 24th, 2006 at 1:22 am
Could be that some are just reticent. I know more than a few who kind of just wrinkle their noses at the whole sordid affair. Can’t say I blame them, but it’s putting a lot of reliance upon the kindness of strangers.
January 24th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
1984 center = 1999 left
1999 left = 20?? internment camp statistic.
January 24th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Perhaps there is a neurological basis for this?
January 24th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
You gotta wonder. If chemistry is the “hardest” of the natural sciences listed, then on a scale from poetry to physics, there’s a pretty good fit with an inverse relationship between the “hardness” of the subject and the ratio Dems. to Repubs. I mean, why do people most often pick the subjects they do, if not for their innate talents and proclivities?
It’s interesting to reminisce about undergrad…I kind of exercised some ideological demons then, I think, and by the time I graduated I had a belly full of politics and was quite happy to make myself miserable with something else…like graduate school. As that pretty much ate my life, I didn’t spend much additional time debating the merits or deficits of anarchosyndicalism with a contact high and a five-beer buzz.
That said, my core political instincts really haven’t changed one bit since I had my head screwed on straight enough to discern them. Meanwhile, some of the things that come out of my Dad’s mouth make me want to ask him, “C’mon…who’s the guy who fathered me really?” I know he does it mostly because it tickles him to watch me make that “I’m going to have an aneurysm” face. Still, since my mother never spoke to me about politics, I’m at a loss to explain how upbringing shaped my political views.
January 25th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
“Here engineering has somewhat of a Right bias and other (less technical or theoretical) fields”
I am not sure if “antti rasinen” is suggesting that disciplines such as philosophy, language studies, and economics are “less technical or theoretical” but if this is the case, we have a failure to communicate. Literary theory, linquistic philosophy, etc. are some of the most arcana filled theoretical fields imaginable. Sometimes i wish semioticians were more willing to engage physicists, only to suggest that when forced to use (in this case) the English language one really should know what it is.
January 25th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
The reason there are no numbers for Math and Physics is simple: those at the top of the intellectual food chain are too smart to reveal their leanings on paper.
January 30th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Fascinating discussion! Was a double major with physics as second in undergrad in the early 80s. I identify in general as a conservative, less so on social issues and perhaps libertarian is the best term. In any event, the pivotal moment for myself and I believe quite a few others my age, the taking of the hostages in Iran, was a wakeup call if you will. In 1984 I recall the only Mondale supporter in my fraternity being teased relentlessly the night Reagan was re-elected, and this on the east coast. What I believe has change since are two things – 1) academics seem to feel it is now ok to espouse their own political views during a class, either outright or by off handed remarks or “jokes”. I honestly can’t recall any such remarks during my undergrad days. 2) A few posters intimate that the center has moved simply by a redefinition of what is the center, in the sense that “Republicans say this is the center and thus it is”, while underneath peoples real views have not changed. I disagree – I believe there has been a shift to more conservative values, or perhaps more a shift away from liberal values. But also, and I think this is the key, is that political discourse has left the center behind and is now determined only by the polar extremes on the hard right and hard left. Civility and rational thought have left the house to be replaced by pandering and gotchas. I’m sure there are just as many “R’s” as “D’s” who feel out of place within their own parties because those running each tend to demonize and exclude all but those who move in lockstep with their agenda. Sorry such a long post! But at least its at the end