The political views of American academics began to receive attention in the 1930s, and investigation into faculty political views expanded rapidly after the rise of McCarthyism. Demographic surveys of faculty that began in the 1950s and continue to the present have found higher percentages of liberals than of conservatives, particularly among those who work in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers and pundits disagree about survey methodology and about the interpretations of the findings.
History Pre- and post-WWII
Carol SmithSmith, Carol. (2011). "The dress rehearsal for McCarthyism." Academe 94(4): 48–51. and Stephen LebersteinStephen Leberstein, "Purging the Profs: The Rapp Coudert Committee in New York, 1940–1942," in Michael E. Brown et al. (eds.), New Studies in the Politics and Culture of US Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993; p. 92. have documented investigations of professors' political views at the City College of New York (CCNY) during the 1930s and 1940s. Citing the tactics of private hearings, requiring respondents to name others, and denying rights of legal representation, Smith calls the investigations a "dress rehearsal for McCarthyism". Smith described the case of Max Yergan, who was the first African American professor hired at the CCNY. After complaints that he expressed liberal and progressive views in his classes on Negro History and Culture, Yergan was terminated in 1936. In 1938, the U.S. House of Representatives created the House Un-American Activities Committee; one of the committee's first actions was to attempt to investigate the political views of faculty in the New York public colleges.
In 1940, Bertrand Russell was denied employment as a philosophy professor at CCNY because of his political beliefs. That same year, the New York State Legislature created the Rapp-Coutert Committee, which held hearings in 1940–41 during which faculty accused of holding communist political beliefs were interrogated. More than 50 faculty and staff at CCNY resigned or were terminated as a result of the hearings. One professor, Morris Schappes, served a year in prison on perjury charges for refusing to name colleagues who may have been affiliated with the Communist party. Smith believes that the investigations caused the largest political purge on one campus in the history of the US.
In 1942, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), began investigating the political views of W.E.B. DuBois, an African American sociologist who taught at Atlanta University. The investigation centered on DuBois's 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn. Although the investigation was dismissed, Atlanta University fired DuBois in 1943. Public outcry led the university to reinstate DuBois, but he retired in 1944. In 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee summoned faculty members from the University of Washington, and three tenured faculty members were fired.
Public concern about the political opinions of college teachers intensified after World War II ended in 1945. Sociologists who were investigated by the FBI for their political beliefs during this period include Ernest Burgess, William Fielding Ogburn, Robert Staughton Lynd, Helen Lynd, E. Franklin Frazier, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Talcott Parsons, Herbert Blumer, Samuel Stouffer, C. Wright Mills, and Edwin H. Sutherland.
McCarthyism and loyalty oaths
Although government employees and entertainment figures were most often investigated for alleged communist sympathies during the "Second Red Scare" of the 1950s, many university faculty were accused as well. In their 1955 study of 2,451 social scientists who taught at American colleges and universities, Lazarsfeld and Thielens noted that the period of 1945–55 was especially marked by suspicion and attacks on colleges for the political views of their faculty. These authors label this period "the difficult years."
In 1950, the University of California Board of Regents and its administration began to require faculty to sign a two-part political loyalty oath: one part required faculty to declare they were not Communists, and did not believe in the tenets of Communism;Radin, Max. (1950). Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–1955), 36(2): 237–245. the other part was an oath of loyalty to the state of California and the US Constitution in accordance with the Levering Act. In early March, 1950, the faculty, who numbered 900, unanimously refused to sign even though the Regents threatened non-signers with termination. Faculty who refused to sign the loyalty oath were terminated, although most of the terminations were later overturned by a California state court. In 1951, members of the American Legion began accusing various university faculty of being communists. University administrations responded by banning left-wing student groups and communist speakers. Joseph McCarthy's Senate committee investigated 18 faculty members at Sarah Lawrence College, some of whom were pressured to resign.
According to historian Ellen Schrecker, "it is very clear that an academic blacklist was in operation during the McCarthy era." An estimated 100 university faculty were terminated during the McCarthy era due to suspicions about their political beliefs.Aby, Stephen H. (2009). "Discretion over valor: The AAUP during the McCarthy Years." American Educational History Journal 36(1): 121–132. In 1970, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover sent an open letter to US college students, advising them to reject leftist politics, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI conducted a secret counterintelligence program in libraries.
Surveys
Ford Foundation In 1955, Robert Maynard Hutchins led an effort within the Ford Foundation to document and analyze the effects of McCarthyism on academic freedom. He commissioned sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to conduct a study of university faculty in the United States, and the results were published by Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens in a book, The Academic Mind. As part of a survey of faculty views about academic freedom during the "Second Red Scare", they asked 2,451 professors of social science a large number of questions, and found that about two thirds of these faculty members had been visited by the FBI and had been asked questions about the political beliefs of their colleagues, students, and themselves. They also included a few questions about political party affiliations and recent voting patterns, and reported that there were more Democrats than Republicans, 47% to 16%. According to sociologist Neil Gross, the study was significant because it was the first effort to poll university faculty specifically about their political views.
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education The Lazarsfeld and Thielens study had examined a sample of 2,451 social science faculty members. A second study, conducted in 1969 on behalf of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, was the first to be performed with a large survey sample, extensive questions about political views, and what Neil Gross characterized as highly rigorous analytic methods. The study was conducted in 1969 by political scientist Everett Carll Ladd and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who surveyed 60,000 academics in multiple fields of study at 303 institutions about their political views. Publishing their results in the 1975 book The Divided Academy, Ladd and Lipset found that about 46% of professors described themselves as liberal, 27% described themselves as moderates, and 28% described themselves as conservative. They also reported that faculty in the humanities and social sciences tended to be the most liberal, while those in "applied professional schools such as nursing and home economics" and in agriculture were the most conservative. Younger faculty tended to be more liberal than older faculty, and faculty across the political spectrum tended to disapprove of the student activism of the 1960s.
Smaller follow-up surveys on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation held in 1975, 1984, 1989, and 1997 showed an increased trend among professors toward the left, apart from a small movement to the right in 1984. By the 1997 study, 57% of the professors surveyed identified as liberals, 20% as moderates, and 24% as conservatives.
Later surveys As later surveys were published, some scholars pointed to the harmful effects of a political imbalance in the faculty, and one editorial described the effects as "ruining college". Other scholars said that there were serious methodological problems that led to overestimates of the disparity between liberals and conservatives, and that there were political motivations for such overestimates.
Higher Education Research Institute Beginning in 1989, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles has conducted a survey of full-time faculty at American four-year colleges and universities every three years. The HERI Faculty Survey gathers comprehensive information about the faculty experience, such as position, field, institutional details, and personal opinion and views, including a single question asking respondents to self-identify their political orientation as "far left", "liberal", "moderate/middle of the road", "conservative", or "far right". Between 1989 and 1998, the survey showed negligible change in the number of professors who described themselves as far left or liberal, approximately 45%. , surveying 16,112 professors, the percentage of liberal/far left had increased to 60%. When asked in 2012 about the significance of the findings on political views, the director of HERI, Sylvia Hurtado, said that the numbers on political views attract a lot of attention, but that this attention may be misplaced because there may be trivial reasons for the shifts.
North American Academic Survey Study Ladd and Lipset, who had conducted the original Carnegie survey, designed a telephone survey in 1999 of approximately 4000 faculty, administrators, and students, called the North American Academic Survey Study (NAASS). The survey found the ratio of those identifying themselves as Democrat to those identifying as Republican to be 12 to 1 in the humanities, and 6.5 to 1 in the social sciences. Stanley Rothman, the project lead after the passing of Ladd and Lipset, published a paper using NAASS data along with Neil Nevitte and S. Robert Lichter which concluded "complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study". Rothman along with co-authors Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner reported their extended findings in a book titled The Still Divided Academy."Five myths about liberal academia", Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011 Washington Post
Politics of the American Professoriate Neil Gross and Solon Simmons conducted a survey starting in 2006 called the Politics of the American Professoriate which led to several study papers and books. They designed their survey to improve on past studies which they felt had not included community college professors, addressed low response rates, or used standardized questions. The survey drew upon a sample size of 1417 full-time professors from 927 institutions.
In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative. Inside Higher Ed reported that economist Lawrence H. Summers made his own analysis of the data collected by Gross and Simmons and found a larger gap among faculty teaching "core disciplines for undergraduate education" at selective research universities, but the report also concluded that "there was widespread praise for the way the survey was conducted, with Summers and others predicting that their data may become the definitive source for understanding professors' political views."