Professors’ Politics and their Appeal as Instructors

• In Event: Teaching Political Science: A Closer Look at Faculty

Abstract

As more universities view students as customers and as more critics accuse universities of political bias, it is important to learn how students respond to professors’ politics. The salience of the current political climate (Abramowitz and Webster 2018) as well as the treatment of students as customers (Barr and Turner 2013) give importance to the issue, as do the competing interests within higher education (Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner 2010). This study asks whether a course becomes less attractive to students when the instructor is overtly partisan. This study also explores how a student’s political outlook affects their interest in such professors. These questions are important for faculty making decisions about maintaining political neutrality in their teaching, for institutions concerned about the political climate on campus, and for those concerned about academic freedom (Gormley-Heenan 2012). Does a politically active professor make a course more appealing or less so?
In this experiment, I randomly presented descriptions of course instructors to current university students (n=466) and ask them to describe the appeal of taking a course with the instructor. Descriptions varied only in terms of political ideology of the professor. Analysis focused on the effects of the professor description on expressing interest in the course, and explored how political identity of the subject affected responses as well.
Subjects expressed greater interest in professors who were politically ambiguous or whose politics match their own. Conservative professors were more polarizing than liberal professors and liberal students rejected conservative professors more than they preferred liberal professors. Based on these results, political neutrality is the safest best for attracting a broad set of students, especially when the professor is conservative.

Author

• Jason Giersch, University of North Carolina, Charlotte