Do Faculty Affect Their Students’ Political Beliefs?

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

Abstract

Funding and instruction at American universities has become highly politicized, in part due to claims by Republican politicians that Democratic college professors “indoctrinate” their students to become liberal. In this paper, we study whether there is scope for professors to do so. We first use voter rolls and voter history files linked to publicly available payroll records from 34 state flagship universities to document the partisanship of college professors and course instructors. We then use natural language processing tools to describe the content of individual course materials and study whether Democratic instructors assign different materials than their Republican or non-partisan counterparts. Finally, we use student transcript data from one university to link students to instructors and study the causal effect of instructors on student self-reported ideology and party registration. College faculty are predominantly Democrats, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Although Democratic instructors are more likely to assign course materials that conservative policymakers would deem controversial, this is entirely explained by the types of courses Democrats teach; we find little difference in course content when comparing sections of the same course taught by Republican and Democratic instructors. College students are mostly liberals when they enter college, and many become more liberal during college. However, faculty do not cause this leftward shift. This is because students sort across academic fields on their political beliefs, leaving little room for indoctrination. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach a given course, we estimate precise null effects of faculty partisanship on student beliefs or party registration. Ideological diversity among college students is limited, but claims that this is because of what college faculty teach are not justified. 

Author

• Micah Y Baum, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author