Politics of the Professoriate: Longitudinal Evidence From All Faculty of a State Public University System

• In Event: Causes and Effects of Political Polarization in Higher Education

Abstract

Institutions of higher education face increasing pressure from politicians to change how they operate. Motivating these efforts are concerns that the (liberal) political ideologies of faculty do not represent the broader population as a whole and, as a result, professors may be instructing or conducting research on topics that challenge conservatives’ values, ideals, and self-interest. The extent to which these concerns are grounded in reality, however, is uncertain, as most studies draw on individual university or college cases, which prevents a generalized understanding of faculty’s ideologies. Alternatively, investigations rely on data collected from a (sometimes random) sample of professors across institutions, which helps with generalizability but hinders more nuanced assessment of the politics of specific subgroups of professors. Finally, we do not know whether threats to higher education themselves have changed the demand and supply of faculty by partisanship over time.

In this paper, we address these gaps in understanding and ask:

1) What are the political outcomes for professors over time, including for rates of voter registration, party registration, and voting in general elections? 

2) How do these outcomes vary by key institutional and individual characteristics, such as the type of postsecondary institution of employment, or professors’ professional position and department of affiliation?

3) How do these outcomes compare to those of the broader population? Specifically, do political outcomes vary between professors and individuals of traditional college-going age living in the same county as professors’ postsecondary institutions of employment?

To answer these questions, we use data on political outcomes collected for the universe of faculty from the entire public university system of a single state, collated biennially from 2014 through 2024. Over this decade, postsecondary institutions across this state were the target of elected officials’ efforts to weaken academic tenure, abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and challenge independent system governance.

We first find that faculty rates of voter registration and general election voting are largely consistent across the decade, but partisanship exhibits a stark trend: More and more professors over time are not registered affiliates of either the Democratic or Republican party. But declines are greater for Democrats and by the end of 2024, unaffiliated professors represent nearly the same proportion of registrants as Democratic professors (with Republican professors maintaining a distant third place). This weakening “enthusiasm” for party politics (especially for Democrats) replicates for varying types of professors’ postsecondary institution and positions (e.g., lecturers vs. tenured full professors). In contrast, we do find substantial divergence in party registration rates by professors’ departments, though all of the state’s largest university departments realign from Democratic and Republican affiliation towards registrations with neither party. Finally, we show that professors on average are indeed substantially more likely to be registered as a Democrat relative to college-aged individuals. However, a decade of partisan resorting suggests that the oldest individuals in this group (23-year-olds, i.e., those with the longest potential “exposure” to professors and their political ideologies) are markedly more Republican than faculty in 2024 than they were in 2014.

 

Author

• Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author