I congratulate the DCU on doing some empirical homework with regards to faculty voter registration records. That's the kind of detailed archival research that professionals rely on in many careers, and will serve them well.
However, data is not analysis. When faced with numbers, we have to ask what those numbers represent, and what the trend might mean.
As several faculty have pointed out, a simple reduction of Democrat to liberal isn't necessarily valid (think Joe Leiberman, for instance). But even if it was, we would then be left with the need to explain why our humanities faculty is so skewed.
The left might explain this disparity through a belief that more education makes you smarter, and being smarter tends toward making you more liberal (as in Professor Brandon's delightful quote from J.S. Mill, "Stupid people are generally conservative"). The right might counter by saying that anyone who has spent a decade or more in a socialist university system to get a Ph.D. will have succumbed to either the brainwashing or the peer pressure of mushy liberalism.
Here's an alternative thought. In order to teach in a university, one must have gone through four years of undergraduate training and another long stretch of graduate school. We have learned to carefully hear the ideas of others, and make use of them in our own work. Grad school in the humanities is particularly group oriented, with a strong cohort effect that leads to real communities of care and concern. And once were on a faculty, we're constantly asked to make collaborative decisions, to engage in collective planning, to take on committee work, often for far less money than our peers in other professions.
We engage groups of students and help them come together to test their own knowledge and conclusions, rather than sitting in an office cubicle making stock trades. The whole process is self-selective for the kind of people who have communitarian rather than individualistic concerns.
Now compare that to faculty in science and professional schools, where resources and reputations are deeply competitive and a scientist can be scooped out of a discovery within weeks of its anticipated completion, and we might expect to see a more mixed outcome. I look forward to the DCU's continued data collection and potential analysis of this phenomenon.
Herb Childress
University Writing Program
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