Numbers on Berkeley's liberalism

Professor Daniel Klein's study on liberals in academia

By Amaris White
From the April 2005 Print Edition

On campuses all over America, there has been talk for years about the liberal academic atmosphere. Professor Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University, recently did a study on voter registration for professors at UC Berkeley and Stanford and has confirmed these suspicions. He was kind enough to offer his time for an interview with the Patriot.

Patriot: How did you first become interested in this issue?

Klein: I have this general interest in our political culture because I’m a Libertarian, and I don’t understand why more people aren’t libertarian, free-market, or conservative and so I’ve been studying our political culture and one thing led to another. I’m an academic myself.

P: How did you conduct your research?

K: Well, there are two main investigations of faculty. One is a voter-registration investigation of the Stanford and Berkeley faculty. Basically, we got faculty lists from 23 departments from each school and went to the seven county registrars and found out how people were registered. The other was a large survey that was sent to members of six different academic associations and we got a total of 1,678 respondents. That is the best information available on the politics of the academics. The survey included not only a voting question but 18 policy issue questions so we got a very good set of data on what the academics in six fields think on policy issues.

P: What made you conduct your research as you did?

K: Again, to some extent I’m trying to understand our political culture because in some sense I’m so confounded by it. I really don’t understand why more people don’t just oppose activist government, and I’m an academic and I’m p---ed off about it and I see error and irresponsibility around us in academia, among professors.

P: Where did you begin?

K: I’ve written quite a bit about the character of academic economics. I’m the editor of Econ Journal Watch, a Web journal with five Nobel Laureates on the council. We’re developing an encompassing critique of academic economics.

Why don’t these influential intellectuals lift a finger to oppose all this bad stuff? Why are they so political? Why are they so establishment/status-quo–oriented?

Economists usually understand how some things work and why we have all these problems; why isn’t economics a positive force for free markets? This is why I’ve been long involved in addressing this question. I’ve done other kinds of investigations, so this isn’t coming out of nowhere for me by any means. I definitely think of myself as a member of the non-left faculty, and I’ve long thought of myself this way. I’ve been long involved in the libertarian movement and think tanks.

P: How did you reach your conclusions?

K: Well, the main conclusion is that academia is dominated by faculty who vote Democrat, overwhelmingly in social studies and humanities. The degree of lopsidedness varies by field. Economics is least lopsided — it’s really quite an outlier — it’s only 3-to-1 Democrat to Republican in economics. I think political science is 6.7-to-1, and then it goes up from there to 9-to-1, and sociology is about 28-to-1, and it’s pretty clear from other evidence that all the rest of the social sciences are in the 10-to-1 neighborhood, with only political science and economics being less. I figure, on the whole, it’s about 8-to-1 in the social sciences and humanities. That’s the main conclusion that people have been talking about; that is what’s been on the news. We also have data on 18 policy issues, and there are a lot of other interesting things that come from that. There’s more diversity of opinion among Republicans than Democrats. There are a couple issues where the Democrats are less pro-government.

A very interesting finding is that in the survey, with the question: “Are you an academic?” some responded that they are academics and others responded that they are in the government, the private sector, or independent research. The Democrat-to-Republican ratio is about twice as high in academics than non-academics, which is clear evidence that the Republicans are being sorted out. No one can say that Republicans are not interested in academia, because these are clearly intellectuals, but there are many more Republicans among the non-academics than the academic members, which means Republicans are getting their Ph.D.s and landing outside of academia, and I think they are being sorted out.

P: What do you think are the implications of this?

K: Academia is pretty much totally controlled by Democrats, and since professors are an elite source of political culture, students are not getting good exposure to non-left ideas. I think the implications are pretty huge. This isn’t news really: Everyone already knew academia tended to be this way, but I think no one really thought it was this extreme — at least no one on the street did. I think this is going to be an ongoing issue, it won’t disappear from O’Reilly or others soon, and people are going to start asking what ordinary people should do — taxpayers, parents, alumni — and I think the main thing they should do is know what they’re paying for. Since they’re paying for biased professors, they might decide they don’t want to pay for it.

You can read Professor Klein’s Study at http://lsb.scu.edu/~dklein/

If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting the Patriot