Current Activities

Hudson Valley One covered my candidacy in the Town of Olive town supervisor race here. Although I lost to my able opponent, Jim Sofranko, I continue to work on important projects and to teach full-time.  There may be a series of law suits at CUNY concerning issues that I, as a named plaintiff, cannot publicly discuss.  As well, I am working on a large-scale research project with the Marnell brothers, Bob, Matt, and Mark.  

The Washington Post recently published Niall Ferguson's op-ed about the founding of Austin University, a university devoted to academic freedom. Professor Ferguson's op-ed spends a paragraph on my research on political affiliation of university professors.  Last February the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted me on outdoor work, and in August WalletHub quoted me on CLUE reports. 

Earlier this year Studies in Higher Education, the education journal that is highest ranked by the Australian Business Deans Council, the journal ranking  most important to business schools globally, published Sean Stevens's and my piece "Partisan Registration of Faculty in Flagship Colleges." Langbert and Stevens's "Partisan Registration and Contributions in Flagship Colleges," published in 2020, is still available on the National Association of Scholars' blog.

I will continue to teach full-time for the next few years and continue to live in the Catskill Mountains near Phoenicia, Woodstock, Liberty, and Kingston. I am traveling to Curacao in the first half of January.  If you need to reach me, please use my home email address mlangbert@hvc.rr.com. No hate mail, please.  

Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges

Sean Stevens and I have been working on a study of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states that make registration public (mostly closed-primary states).  The National Association of Scholars has posted our findings on their blog. We cross-checked each registration against the political donations.  For party registration, we find a D:R ratio of 8.5:1, which varies by rank of institution and region.  For federal donations (from the FEC data base) we find a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors(compared to 2,081 Democratic donors) out of 12,372 professors.  Federal donations among all categories of party registration, including Republican, favor the Democrats: D:R donation ratios for Democratic-registered professors are 251:1; for Republican-registered professors 4.6:1; for minor-party-registered professors 10:0; for unaffiliated professors 50:1; for non-registered professors 105:1. We include a school-by-school table that facilitates comparisons. 

  

Homogeneity: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts Faculty

My new article just published in Academic Questions  looks at 51 of the top-66 liberal arts colleges. The findings may be unsurprising, but they are startling. The paper extends and amplifies an earlier paper by Dan Klein, Tony Quain, and me.  

If the military colleges (West Point and Annapolis) are excluded, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in elite liberal arts colleges--including places like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Colby, and Trinity--is 12.7:1, even higher than the social science departments at elite research universities. If the two military colleges are included, the ratio falls to 10.4:1. 

However, the fields differ sharply. The hard science fields like engineering, chemistry and math; the professional fields like business; and the hard social science fields of economics and political science have D:R ratios closer to the baseline of a Democratic-to-Republican ratio of 1.6:1 than do the soft social sciences and humanities. The interdisciplinary studies fields (women’s studies, Black studies, gender studies, and so on) have a ratio of 108:0.

78.2 percent of the academic departments in the liberal arts colleges have 0 Republicans; that is, only 21.8 percent of the academic departments among the top liberal arts colleges include one or more Republican. As well, zero falls within the margin of error in 20 of 51 or 39.2 percent of the colleges. In other words, in 39.2 percent of the 51 colleges, there is no statistical difference between the proportion of Republicans and zero.

Besides sharp differences across fields of study, there are sharp differences among colleges. Bryn Mawr and Soka, a Buddhist college in California, have D:R ratios of 72:0 and 20:0. The military colleges have ratios of 2.3:1 and 1.3:1. For one small, conservative Catholic college, Thomas Aquinas, I could find no Democrats. In other words, institutional differences in the forms of the field and the college make a big difference as to how left-slanted college faculties are.