Liberal Bias in Academia: The role of Jewish academics in the creation and maintenance of academic liberalism
A study to be published in September in Current Directions in Psychological Science, prominent peer-reviewed academic journal, goes beyond the well-known fact that the vast majority of social psychologists are on the left (“Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement“).
Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” …
More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” …
Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy. …
A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative. …
[While much larger percentages of faculty are economic conservatives,] the widest divide occurs on social issues, the contested terrain in the culture wars shaking the academy. On these contentious issues, 90 percent identified as liberal and only 4 percent as conservative.
Of course, social psychologists by definition perform research on social issues—precisely the areas where they are overwhelmingly liberal. Don’t expect any race realist research on criminality or ethnic differences in aggressiveness to come out of mainstream social psychology. Read more