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 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 link voter registration data to payroll records from 33 state flagship universities to document the partisanship of college faculty and use transcript data from one university to study the causal effect of instructor partisanship on student political ideology. College faculty are disproportionately Democrats, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Students are mostly liberals when they enter college, become more liberal during college regardless of their major, and sort to courses where instructors share their political ideology. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach a given course, we estimate null overall effects of faculty partisanship on student party affiliation. However, in the humanities and social sciences, exposure to Democratic faculty slightly reduces liberal identification post-college. To understand these results, we use natural language processing tools to study the frequency of politically salient and left-leaning course content. These topics are not featured at higher rates when Democratic instructors teach a given course, meaning student sorting leaves little room for indoctrination. 

Author

• Micah Y Baum, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author