The American social psychologist Jon Haidt recently reported a study by William von Hippel and David Buss of the political leanings of American social psychologists.  Members of their professional society SPSP were asked to describe their stance on a scale which ran from extremely liberal to conservative. 89% of respondents described themselves as left of centre and less than 3% as right of centre.  95% had supported Barack Obama and 1%  Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election.  I am not surprised that social science professors are to the left of the general population, but taken aback by the magnitude of the difference.

Haidt describes himself as a liberal turned centrist; others might think he had not only shifted to the right but had done so with a convert’s zeal. He is a member of the ‘Heterodox Academy’, a handful of conservative social scientists who denounce leftist bias in university teaching and research.  But surely economics at least is irretrievably right wing, its practitioners gripped by the invisible hand as they sing the praise of free markets.  No; while academic economists are indeed to the right of other social scientists, their political preferences are still strongly Democratic – by a margin of three to one, according to a survey by Daniel Klein and Carlotta Stern.

The leftist trend has become more marked over time.  The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that the proportion of  all college and university faculty as a whole – not just social scientists –  who described themselves as ‘far left/liberal’ has risen from around 40% in 1989 to over 60% today

Paul Krugman, standard bearer for the liberal position, has suggested that the explanation is not that the academy has moved left but that American politics has moved right.  He makes the telling point that in 1992 the Republican candidate was George H W Bush, while the 2016 front runners are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: by contrast, the Democratic camp has replaced Bill Clinton by Hilary Clinton.  Polls show that support for Trump falls off in educated communities, and may be particularly low in the best educated community of all.

      But British data belies Krugman’s explanation. Academic support for the Conservatives certainly declined under Margaret Thatcher; A H Halsey reported that 38% of dons favoured the Conservative party in 1966 but only 19% in 1989. But David Cameron is plainly to the left of Margaret Thatcher, while there is little difference between the political stances of Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband.  Yet the continuing leftward trend is seen in Britain too. The Times Higher Education  Supplement’s poll of 2015 voting intentions among university faculty  found 46% would vote Labour (and an astonishing 22% Green) with only 11% Conservative. (That party fared best at London Business School).

Elites were traditionally conservative even if professors were always the most radical of elites. But the relative economic position of professors has deteriorated. And  political opinion is defined today less by economic interests than by social issues. The well off and well educated are generally more socially liberal than the traditional working class base of parties of the left, among whom Trump and Nigel Farage win significant support.

But the dangers  of uniformity of political opinion on campuses are well illustrated by the commentators on Haidt’s piece who argued (apparently without irony) that there was nothing surprising about his findings  because social psychology demonstrated the objective truth of liberal positions. All communities are subject to groupthink, and in the academic world the rise of peer review and the importance of grant funding have reinforced it. The word ‘diversity’ is today used endlessly on campuses. But it is too often associated with reduced tolerance of the diversity  of thought and opinion which should be the defining characteristic of the university. 

Citation:

http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/klein_stern.pdf   economists vote democrat

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/academics-and-politics/?_r=0

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/01/07/new-study-finds-conservative-social-psychologists/   Haidt

https://osf.io/ebvtq/  von Hippel

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/almost-half-of-sector-to-back-labour-the-election-poll-suggests/2019944.article  opinion poll

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/general-election-2015-which-way-are-your-universitys-staff-likely-to-vote/2020070.article  London Business School