And yet Chris Rufo and his predecessors have successfully gotten us to believe that academia is rife with woke commie harpies who want nothing but to overthrow democracy and capitalism when the reality is most are being funded by and are actively courting the oligarchic right and far-right to solidify their weird plots making sure only *certain people* get to have college degrees or enter think tanks or *get put into positions of power*.
Speaking as a total progressive radical type, I can only say I WISH! Despite being in English departments (which are often considered amongst the MOST liberal/radical/etc. departments on campus), there were always a number of conservatives (of course my Texas English department probably skewed a bit more right than my Washington state one!). Although I can still fall over laughing as I remember how, in a class discussion on George Will's article about the Marxist MLA (I was "teaching the conflicts" back in the 1990s), my students mostly agreed that English departments were full of Marxists. Knowing my colleagues all personally, I asked them who they had taken: Dr. G. was one (retired military, right-wing, the whole way). I said, really? You think HE is a Marxist? There was a pause, and one, very brave young woman, finally said, "well, he's a liberal" (newsflash: he was not -- although he was a firm believer in academic freedom, and he and I got along very well!). So, yeah. And there is some research that implies the percentages of liberals vs. conservatives over the years tended to be in some degree determined by self-selection, especially in the lower-paid humanities fields (as opposed the Business Colleges). And of course there's a lot of differences among regions and type of schools. I'll drop a few links in the comments (all fairly old, but I haven't seen any recent studies). And none of the research matters to people who want to shut down all critical education and turn the universities into vocational programs (I cannot believe that there are people who want to send librarians to jail for doing their jobs).
And yet Chris Rufo and his predecessors have successfully gotten us to believe that academia is rife with woke commie harpies who want nothing but to overthrow democracy and capitalism when the reality is most are being funded by and are actively courting the oligarchic right and far-right to solidify their weird plots making sure only *certain people* get to have college degrees or enter think tanks or *get put into positions of power*.
Speaking as a total progressive radical type, I can only say I WISH! Despite being in English departments (which are often considered amongst the MOST liberal/radical/etc. departments on campus), there were always a number of conservatives (of course my Texas English department probably skewed a bit more right than my Washington state one!). Although I can still fall over laughing as I remember how, in a class discussion on George Will's article about the Marxist MLA (I was "teaching the conflicts" back in the 1990s), my students mostly agreed that English departments were full of Marxists. Knowing my colleagues all personally, I asked them who they had taken: Dr. G. was one (retired military, right-wing, the whole way). I said, really? You think HE is a Marxist? There was a pause, and one, very brave young woman, finally said, "well, he's a liberal" (newsflash: he was not -- although he was a firm believer in academic freedom, and he and I got along very well!). So, yeah. And there is some research that implies the percentages of liberals vs. conservatives over the years tended to be in some degree determined by self-selection, especially in the lower-paid humanities fields (as opposed the Business Colleges). And of course there's a lot of differences among regions and type of schools. I'll drop a few links in the comments (all fairly old, but I haven't seen any recent studies). And none of the research matters to people who want to shut down all critical education and turn the universities into vocational programs (I cannot believe that there are people who want to send librarians to jail for doing their jobs).
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/27/research-confirms-professors-lean-left-questions-assumptions-about-what-means
https://www.aaup.org/article/rethinking-plight-conservatives-higher-education