Only 7% Yale professors identify as ‘conservative,’ President Peter Salovey says the results were ‘neither positive nor negative’
A new survey on Yale conducted by a student newspaper has confirmed the shocking political divide among the faculty members of one of the nation’s most elite universities. With only 7 percent identified as conservative, the Yale President Peter Salovey said the results were “neither positive nor negative.”
The incredible slant seems to confirm accusations of liberal bias at universities.
“The Yale Daily News put a startling number on liberal predominance in a survey of the prestigious university’s faculty,” noted College Fix in their coverage of the results, in which 314 respondents participated with only 7 percent identified as conservative, with only 2 percent saying they were “very conservative.”
photo/ John Hain
“…nearly three-quarters identified as liberal or very liberal.”
Summary: 314 professors…ONLY 22 conservative and 6 “very conservative.”
“We talk about diversity in every area of the University except the one that counts, and that’s intellectual diversity,” said Steven Smith, a political science professor. “Universities are basically and fundamentally devoted to the study and investigation of ideas. The expression of the full range of ideas is the central aspect of a university’s mission.”
Speaking with with The News, Yale President Peter Salovey said the results were “neither positive nor negative.”
“It’s in the educational interest of students to be exposed to a diversity of political viewpoints… Having said that, in most fields, the political point of view of a faculty member is not relevant to the substance of their teaching, and so we would need to be very careful about making it a part of the hiring process for faculty,” Salovey told The News.
A more politically diverse faculty would be ideal, computer science professor David Gelernter said, because the ideological leanings of professors have a direct impact on students.
“Students who leave the academic world run a chance, at least, of discovering new approaches to the world and turning conservative,” he said. “But those who stay within academia tend to keep thinking what they’ve been taught to think.”
Later he added that it is important for university faculty to expose themselves to different points of view. While many conservatives regularly peruse the New York Times, he said, relatively few liberal professors read news coverage from centrist or right-wing outlets.
“That’s the real problem,” Gelernter said. “Not the monolithic opinions of the faculty, but the ignorance on which it rests. Of course I don’t mean every liberal — some are brilliant, obviously. But … generally speaking, it’s a grim picture.”
Some departments are even more slanted: “The political skew is particularly pronounced in the humanities, where nearly 90 percent of faculty respondents described themselves as ‘very liberal’ or ‘somewhat liberal.’ By contrast, just 68 percent of social sciences faculty and 65 percent of STEM faculty said they were liberal.”
Joseph Zolner, an expert on higher education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education commented on the findings: “One could be an avowed liberal, but he or she could structure his or her course in a way that is ensuring that students are being exposed to more than just one point of view in a class,” Zolner said.
Is that what we find?
The news added that “More than 90 percent of faculty said climate change is caused by human activity, and 70 percent agreed that New Haven should remain a sanctuary city. But the faculty was split almost 50–50 on whether trigger warnings are necessary to campus discussion.”
