MORE EVIDENCE THAT CRAZY DAVEY HAS NO EVIDENCE

David Horowitz has been on a one-man crusade trying to warn us that Evel Librul Perfessers are brainwashing undergraduates. I noted below that two of his favorite examples turned out to be myths and now 2 professors find no evidence that undergraduates shift significantly further to the left during their college years.

Faculty Are Liberal — Who Cares?

Inside Higher Education
March 27, 2008

A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study — notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor — finds no evidence of indoctrination.

The scholars find some self-selection, with students who enter college as conservative slightly more likely to be found at relatively conservative institutions, and so forth. But over all, they found only slight shifts in political leanings (albeit to the left) during the students’ four years. The analysis also found explanations other than faculty ideology — gender and wealth, for example — that correlate with the modest political shifts that took place. Whether the students attended a college that was more liberal or conservative did not correlate with the shift — which it would have had liberal professors been engaged in indoctrination, the authors write.

Even with the slight shift to the left of students, the authors write, college students graduate with a smaller share of people identifying as “far left” than does the 18-24 year old cohort of the U.S. population.

Political Orientations of Private College Students and the General Population

	Far Left	Liberal	Moderate	Conservative	Far Right
First-year students (1999)	1.6%	23.3%	47.8%	26.0%	1.3%
Seniors (2003)	3.6%	29.1%	42.8%	23.6%	0.9%
18-24 year old cohort in U.S.	5.3%	28.7%	38.3%	23.4%	2.1%