Here is some more political demographic data from the academic world. It was derived from rationalwiki, a site which treats conservative dogmas with crude hostility, and generally treats liberal dogma with emotionless factuality (see creationism or anti-vaccination vs. GMOs or the Jesus Myth). Still, they’re fairly rational, even if they treat what they see as irrationality in different ways depending on who’s saying it.
University of Toronto survey
This survey asked 1,634 full-time employed faculty members at four year institutions across the U.S. However, the sample was largely limited to full-time social-science and humanities professors, which skewed it:[2]
All professors - Ivy League professors
Liberal 72% - 87%
Moderate 13% - 0%
Conservative 15% -13%
Liberal professors by discipline
Humanities - 81%
Social Science - 75%
Engineering - 51%
Business - 49%
According to Christopher Shea of the Boston Globe, a 2001 survey carried out by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute "identified a distinct leftward tilt in academia, but a smaller one than you might expect."[4] It further indicated that extremists on either side of the spectrum make up less than 6% of all professors, although the vast majority of these were left-wingers.
All professors
Far-left - 5.3%
Liberal - 42.3%
Moderate - 34.4%
Conservative - 17.7%
Far-right - 0.3%
[edit]Carnegie University survey
This 1989 survey is somewhat dated. Libertarian Peter G. Klein used this article for his rant on socialist economists, which placed liberals and communists in the same camp.[5] It indicated that over 70% of tenure-tracked professors were liberal, while less than 20% were conservative.
Liberal professors by discipline
Public Affairs
88%Ethnic Studies
76%Anthropologists
72%Political Scientists
72%Economists
63%
