The College Fix

ANALYSIS: College Fix finds about 50 percent of departments have no registered Republican professors in 2022

The College Fix identified just 61 Republican professors across 65 departments at seven universities as part of a recent survey of professor party affiliations nationwide.

A total of 33 of the departments had zero Republican professors identified within them — slightly more than 50 percent of all departments surveyed.

In contrast, 667 professors were identified as Democrat based on their political party registration or voting history in party primaries.

The Fix analyzed The Ohio State University, University of Nebraska-Omaha, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Georgia, Cornell University, University of Oklahoma and the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

Six of the seven states analyzed are primarily Republican, with the exception of New York. Yet, all universities showed a strong Democratic tilt among their faculty.

When broken into Democrat and Republican, 92 percent of professors identify as Democrat and only 8 percent identify as Republican. That amounts to Democrat professors outnumbering Republican professors by a ratio of 11 to 1.

“These results should be another wake-up call that higher education is severely biased and broken,” said Jennifer Kabbany, editor-in-chief of The College Fix.

“The foxes are guarding the hen house,” she said. “If parents, politicians and watchdogs wonder why students go into college as innocent and eager 18-year-olds and come out four years later as mouth-breathing progressive-socialist Democrats, look no further than the people teaching them what to think day in and day out at college.”

The departments analyzed at each university were primarily humanities departments, such as English, economics, and philosophy. Aside from Democrat and Republican, there were six other affiliations, including unaffiliated, nonpartisan, libertarian, blank, independent and undeclared. The Fix could not identify the political affiliation of every professor.

“What that tells us is regardless of who voters put in office, lawmakers are not taking seriously enough the insidious problem of liberal bias in colleges and universities,” Kabbany said. “Higher education is one of the most important battlegrounds for the heart, soul and mind of this nation. Legislatures have the power to ensure employment laws are followed, and that includes protecting candidates from being discriminated against because of their beliefs.”

Conservative students have expressed their concerns about their professors’ opinion at UNC-Chapel Hill this year, according to a study conducted by UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro. This could be a result of UNC-Chapel Hill having a large number of Democrats in the humanities departments, which alone accounts for over 30 percent of Democrats in the seven universities.

“One of the emerging ideas to solve this problem is to place ombudsman or nonpartisan trustees on faculty hiring committees to ensure all applicants, including Republicans ones, are given due consideration during the hiring process,” Kabbany said. “This suggestion deserves further study because, if this faculty bias problem is left unchecked, it will only continue to get worse.”

“We’ve already seen the retiring old guard of classically liberal professors being rapidly replaced by budding scholars trained up in critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion dogmas. Today, hiring committees also have so-called diversity and inclusion monitors and require applicants to submit diversity statements,” Kabbany said.

In almost all cases, the analysis relied on political registration of professors. However, the University of Georgia analysis used primary voting records, since the state does not have citizens register by party.

MORE: Harvard student paper denies 82 percent liberal faculty is a problem

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