Left Right

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed: If you ask professors about their politics, they’ll say one thing. But if you use a complex algorithm to predict their politics based on their social-media interactions — as a recent study did — it’ll say another.

By scraping the accounts of more than 4,000 faculty members at over 500 institutions, a forthcoming paper based on the study says that the professoriate’s political persuasions are more diverse than previous survey-based research would suggest. The paper, which will be published in The Review of Higher Education, a peer-reviewed journal, also points to polarization across the political spectrum, arguing that professors’ true beliefs are more extreme and varied than widely thought.

The findings come as many conservative policymakers have sought to rein in a perceived left-leaning bias in academe, often drumming up fear over suspected liberal indoctrination. The authors of the study argue that those claims are exaggerations, and hope the paper will give academics some “firepower” to push back on those characterizations.

While conservative faculty members remain a minority, the study finds far more of them than previous research did, with over 13 percent categorized as strongly right-leaning. A major survey-based study in 2013 found that around 9 percent of professors identified as strongly conservative.

Some of the new study’s other findings, though, back up long-established trends: Tenured faculty members are more conservative than junior scholars are, and there are major ideological disparities between disciplines. Business professors and economists, for example, are often very conservative; the humanities and some sociology subfields, meanwhile, are “decidedly liberal.”

The larger share of conservative scholars found in the study could be a product of its contemporary methodology, rather than actual changes in beliefs, said its lead author, Nicholas Havey, who began the research when he was getting his Ph.D. in computational social science at the University of California at [sic] Los Angeles. Havey is now the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s director of institutional research.

Previous studies of faculty politics employed surveys in which professors categorized or described themselves. This study argues that those results could be inaccurate because of people’s warped perceptions of their own politics or social pressures.

An older professor “might think they’re liberal compared to a goalpost they set 30 years prior, but that old goalpost now makes them far-right conservative,” Havey said. Or many professors may have misleadingly labeled themselves as moderate because “no one wants to think of themselves as inherently radical.” The 2013 study found around half of professors identified as moderate; this one says only about 15 percent actually are...

Full article at https://www.chronicle.com/article/actually-there-are-more-conservatives-on-the-faculty-than-you-think-study-finds.