Fascinating numbers from a new study by Mitchell Langbert. And its results just go to further reinforce the Freedom Center's call for intellectual diversity in academia.
The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.
My sample of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report consists of 5,197, or 59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis.1 If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.
Langbert conducted his survey using voter registration data.
You probably won't be too surprised by the results of his field breakdown.
The more practical a field is, the more intellectually diverse it is. The more warped or worthless a field is, the less intellectually diverse it is.
Among other things, intellectual diversity tests established wisdom. And a lack of intellectual diversity leads to absurd nonsense being accepted and taught as truth. The more rigorously a field is tested by reality, the more likely it is to have Republicans. The less it's tested by reality, the more likely it is to have Democrats.