Chronicle of Higher Education - January 15, 2002
Commentator's Survey of Ivy League Professors Finds Few Conservatives By SCOTT SMALLWOOD
David Horowitz, the former campus radical and now conservative commentator, has released a survey of Ivy League professors that he says reveals professors to be far out of step with the rest of the American public.
The survey, he said, was prompted by the outrage spawned by Mr. Horowitz's attempts last year to take out advertisements in several campus newspapers questioning the campaign for reparations for slavery. Mr. Horowitz argues that the new survey reveals a political bias in hiring of faculty members and "confirms what I have been saying for years -- that our universities are less intellectually free than they were even in the McCarthy era."
But the survey, conducted by telephone in November, may not be representative of the overall professoriate. Only professors in the humanities and social sciences were surveyed because that's where the bias exists, Mr. Horowitz said. "I'm speaking of liberal arts, not geneticists or scientists," he said. "We have to recognize that in the liberal arts, there is no bottom line of reality. There is no penalty for false ideas."
The survey -- performed by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, for the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which Mr. Horowitz operates -- questioned 151 professors and has a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage points. Some disciplines were overrepresented in the survey. For instance, 11 percent of the respondents were philosophy professors. At Harvard University, by comparison, the 15 philosophy professors make up about one-half of 1 percent of the 2,000-member faculty.
Twenty-five percent of the survey participants came from sociology, anthropology, or economics departments.
Mr. Horowitz acknowledged that the survey doesn't reflect the entire faculty, but said his main goal was to raise awareness. He said he is planning another advertising campaign, similar to his reparations one, that would highlight bias against conservatives within academe.
"What I'm trying to do with this survey, rather than resolve a dispute, is to open one," he said. "The whole point of a university is that it should be a place of dialogue. ... There are whole departments in the social sciences at elite universities where there are no conservatives. It's a one-party system."
Some highlights from the survey:
* When asked, "All things considered, who do you think has been the best president in the past 40 years?," the surveyed professors chose Bill Clinton most often (26 percent), followed by John F. Kennedy (17 percent). Just 4 percent selected Ronald Reagan. * Sixty-one percent of the surveyed professors said that they voted for Al Gore in the last presidential election. Six percent said that they voted for George W. Bush, and 19 percent reported that they didn't vote. * Twenty-six percent of the surveyed professors favored a government-financed school-voucher program. In contrast, a similar question on a Gallup poll last year found that 62 percent of Americans surveyed favored such a system. * Just 14 percent of the professors said they thought the government should spend money for research and development of a missile-defense system. A recent Gallup poll found that 70 percent of Americans were in favor of such a system.