This November, three academics--Daniel Klein (an economist at Santa Clara University), Andrew Western (a student at the same institution), and Charlotta Stern (a professor at Stockholm University)--published two carefully constructed academic studies of party registration and ideology among academics at a range of institutions.
The full results, downloadable at NAS.org, will eventually be published in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.
"The data indicate that the one-party character of academia is quite uniform across campus," summarize Klein and Western.
The mono-mindedness on campus is actually deeper than even these data indicate, Klein and Western suggest, and likely to deteriorate in the future. Why? Because the few Republicans who do exist on campus are mostly older faculty. Among full professors at Berkeley and Stanford, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 7:1. But among younger untenured assistant and associate profes-sors it's a ridiculous 31:1. Among the rising generation of professors, in other words, Republicans are almost extinct.
This, Klein and Western comment, "strongly suggests the problem has gotten worse over the past decades, and suggests that selection mechanisms have been working in ways that eliminate Republicans.... The situation will get worse before it gets better, because the full professors, where Republicans are to be found, are the ones who will exit the population soonest."
College campuses today, the authors conclude forcefully, are way out of whack politically. The dominant orthodoxy "amounts to a one-party system. That is no longer a matter of conjecture. It is established fact."
