A national study that examined faculty influence on the political views of college students found no evidence of faculty indoctrination. Hamilton Assistant Dean of Faculty for Institutional Research Gordon Hewitt and Mack Mariani, a government professor at Xavier University, used survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute and determined that faculty are fairly liberal, compared to the general population, but that the relative ideology of faculty at the institutional level does not have an effect on the change in student orientation. The data included almost 7,000 students and 3,000 faculty members from 38 institutions.
News of this study, which will be published within the next few months in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics, appeared first in InsideHigherEd.com and then in an Associated Press article during the week of March 24. In "Faculty Are Liberal – Who Cares?," InsideHigherEd.com editor Scott Jaschik noted that, "despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America's youth — or scaring them into adopting new political views." Hewitt and Mariani, a Democrat and Republican respectively, found that even though students make a slight shift to the left during their college years, they graduate with a smaller share of their group identifying as "far left" than do the same aged non-student individuals of the U.S. population.
In "Study: professors' politics have little effect on the views of American students," Associated Press writer Justin Pope observed that the research did not explain why students resist imitating their professors' views. Pope mused that perhaps "students just don't listen to what their professors have to say." The Associated Press story appeared in newspapers and on Web sites across the country including Fox News, Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The International Herald Tribune.
News of this study, which will be published within the next few months in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics, appeared first in InsideHigherEd.com and then in an Associated Press article during the week of March 24. In "Faculty Are Liberal – Who Cares?," InsideHigherEd.com editor Scott Jaschik noted that, "despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America's youth — or scaring them into adopting new political views." Hewitt and Mariani, a Democrat and Republican respectively, found that even though students make a slight shift to the left during their college years, they graduate with a smaller share of their group identifying as "far left" than do the same aged non-student individuals of the U.S. population.
In "Study: professors' politics have little effect on the views of American students," Associated Press writer Justin Pope observed that the research did not explain why students resist imitating their professors' views. Pope mused that perhaps "students just don't listen to what their professors have to say." The Associated Press story appeared in newspapers and on Web sites across the country including Fox News, Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The International Herald Tribune.
