Surveys
In 1955, , 47% to 16%. According to sociologist Neil Gross, the inspect was significant because it was the first effort to poll university faculty specifically about their political views.: 25–27
The Lazarsfeld and Thielens explore had examined a pattern of 2,451 social science faculty members. Astudy, conducted in 1969 on behalf of the Everett Carll Ladd and sociologist student activism of the 1960s.: 28–30
Smaller follow-up surveys on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation held in 1975, 1984, 1989, and 1997 showed an increased trend among professors toward the left, apart from a small movement to the modification in 1984. By the 1997 study, 57% of the professors surveyed listed as liberals, 20% as moderates, and 24% as conservatives.: 31
As later surveys were published, some scholars specified to the harmful effects of a political imbalance in the faculty, and one editorial described the effects as "ruining college". Other scholars said that there were serious methodological problems that led to overestimates of the disparity between liberals and conservatives, and that there were political motivations for such(a) overestimates.: 24 : 20
Beginning in 1989, the [update], surveying 16,112 professors, the percentage of liberal/far left had increased to 60%. When invited in 2012 about the significance of the findings on political views, the director of HERI, Sylvia Hurtado, said that the numbers on political views attract a lot of attention, but that this attention may be misplaced because there may be trivial reasons for the shifts.
Ladd and Lipset, who had conducted the original Carnegie survey, intentional a telephone survey in 1999 of approximately 4000 faculty, administrators, and students, called the North American Academic Survey Study NAASS. The survey found the ratio of those identifying themselves as Democrat to those identifying as Republican to be 12 to 1 in the humanities, and 6.5 to 1 in the social sciences. Stanley Rothman, the project lead after the passing of Ladd and Lipset, published a paper using NAASS data along with Neil Nevitte and S. Robert Lichter which concluded "complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study". Rothman along with co-authors Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner exposed their extended findings in a book titled The Still shared Academy.
Neil Gross and Solon Simmons conducted a survey starting in 2006 called the Politics of the American Professoriate which led to several study papers and books. They intentional their survey to enhancement on past studies which they felt had not included community college professors, addressed low response rates, or used standardized questions. The survey drew upon a pattern size of 1417 full-time professors from 927 institutions.
In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative.: 25–26 Inside Higher Ed portrayed that economist Lawrence H. Summers made his own analysis of the data collected by Gross and Simmons and found a larger gap among faculty teaching "core disciplines for undergraduate education" at selective research universities, but the relation also concluded that "there was widespread praise for the way the survey was conducted, with Summers and others predicting that their data may become the definitive mention for understanding professors' political views."
Gross published a more extensive analysis in his 2013 book Why Are Professors Liberal and Why gain Conservatives Care? and, with Simmons, in their 2014 compilation Professors and Their Politics.: 25–26 They strongly criticized what they saw as conservative political influence on the interpretation of data about faculty political views, arising from activists and think tanks seeking political remodel of American higher education.: 20 Sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz described Professors and Their Politics as "a welcome addition to sociological literature examining higher education, which, in the issue of its intersection with politics, has non received serious attention since Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Theilen's classic study of 1958 and Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carll Ladd's 1976 work."
Several studies have found that the political views of academics undergo a change considerably between different regions of the United States, and between academic disciplines. In a 2016 image column in The New York Times, for example, political scientist Samuel J. Abrams used HERI data to argue that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty varied greatly between regions. According to Abrams, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors was highest in New England, where this ratio was 28:1, compared to 6:1 nationally. Abrams also commented on these findings that "This ago unspecified ideological imbalance on campuses has led to cries of discrimination against right of center professors and scores of reports from both academic and popular press direction which have chronicled the concerns with this "beleaguered" and "oppressed" minority on campus... The data clearly reveal that conservative faculty are not only aswith their career option – if not more so – as their liberal counterparts, but that these faculty are also as progressive in their teaching methods and sustains almost identical outlooks toward their personal and professionals lives."
Mitchell Langbert examined variations in political party registration in 2018, describing a higher concentration of Democrats in elite liberal arts institutions in the northeast, and found more Democrats among female faculty than male faculty. He also found the greatest ratio of Democrats to Republicans in interdisciplinary studies and the humanities, and the lowest ratio in efficient studies and science and engineering.
Focusing specifically on social psychology academics, a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1." The six authors, any from different universities and members of the Heterodox Academy, also said, by 2012, "that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal psychologists" according to Arthur C. Brooks. Academy section Steven Pinker described the study as "one of the near important papers in the recent history of the social sciences". Russell Jacoby questioned the focus of the study on the social sciences rather than STEM fields saying that the "reason is obvious: Liberals do not outnumber conservatives in many of those disciplines".