Liberal bias hurts colleges, study suggests

In response to a recent report accusing college faculties of being overly liberal, several University professors said that political ideologies don't adversely affect the Princeton experience.

The study by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, titled "A Profile of American College Faculty: Volume 1: Political Beliefs & Behavior," suggests that faculties' liberal leanings put them at odds with the beliefs of Americans at large. Professors nationwide are three times more likely to call themselves liberal than conservative, according to the study.

"The presence of a dominant ideology has the potential to interfere with unbiased, honest and creative scholarship and teaching," Gary Tobin, the president of the institute, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wilson School professor Stan Katz said that while most faculty members may register as Democrats, there is not necessarily "a correspondence between their formal party affiliation and their ideology."

As a whole, Katz said, the faculty lacks a coherent political opinion. Katz described a "tiny leftist community" and a "small, but larger, rightist community" but said the "bulk of faculty fall in the middle."

History professor Anthony Grafton, however, noted that the faculty's political views do tend to be liberal.

"It's clear that political opinion in some parts of the university is mostly on one side of the big issues," Grafton said in an email.

"Is this a problem or a natural result of the specialization of contemporary society?" he asked. "Opinion in certain parts of corporate America is also pretty uniform: an accountant friend liked to talk, in the '90s, about going to the national meetings of his firm, where 599 of his partners would scream that Clinton was destroying the country and he would say he thought Clinton was doing a pretty good job."

"The same is true of the military, which in theory is equally open to all patriotic Americans, but in practice plays Fox on most screens, most of the time," Grafton added.

While Grafton defended the political uniformity of the faculty, Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin emphasized the diversity of political ideologies.

As a result of hiring the best scholars without regard to their political beliefs, Dobkin said "we have political diversity on our faculty."

"A few years ago there was speculation about the successor to Alan Greenspan as head of the Fed and Princeton economists were listed as possible successors in either the case that Kerry or Bush won," Dobkin said in an email.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

"This is a fairly typical situation."

After Bush won, an economically conservative Princeton professor did replace Greenspan: Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Department of Economics.

Grafton also acknowledged the presence of conservative thought in other departments.

"I'm glad that Princeton has [politics professor] Robbie George and the Madison Program, to give those who want one a conservative arena for discussion — not every university has something comparable, and I like to see a variety of opinions and values powerfully represented," Grafton said.

Katz admitted that the University would gain from more faculty involvement in political discussion, but said that in his experience, students develop coherent worldviews without the bias of an openly partisan professor.

When it comes to hiring, Katz and Dobkin agree that party affiliation is irrelevant. At Princeton, "one of the basic principles we follow in hiring faculty," Dobkin said, "is to hire the best person for the job without regard to that person's political beliefs, which we often do not know."