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Timeline for Is the "leftist" tendency in academia restricted to humanities?

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May 22, 2023 at 20:04 comment added codeMonkey It's worth noting that this study is 18 years old. It may underestimate how liberal academia is, given everything that has happened since.
May 22, 2023 at 14:17 comment added David K @ohwilleke An interesting data point to bring into this is that theology/religion faculty, who you would expect by definition to be the most religious, are #3 in terms of liberalism. I think it just bolsters your argument that religious belief itself is less important than socio-political professions.
May 22, 2023 at 8:33 history edited Rekesoft CC BY-SA 4.0
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S May 22, 2023 at 8:32 history suggested OrigamiEye CC BY-SA 4.0
Added country of survey
May 22, 2023 at 7:56 review Suggested edits
S May 22, 2023 at 8:32
May 22, 2023 at 5:57 comment added lly Of course for future editors, if the question stays this broad, it would be best to include data from other parts of the world.
May 22, 2023 at 5:55 comment added lly Upvote despite being an extremely unhelpful way of presenting that data. Just show the actual base percent % or mark them as lean in some way other than the verbal description of the numbers. Do also mark this as US-specific, of course.
May 21, 2023 at 19:37 comment added J-J-J May be worth asking a question on stats.stackexchange.com to see if we can conclude anything relative to the breakdown by departments. At first glance it looks like a small-ish sample to break things down like that. For example we end up with 26 surveyed people in Philosophy, with 22 classified as liberal or conservative. Hard to believe this is a reliable result for this department, given the sample size.
May 21, 2023 at 16:40 comment added ohwilleke♦ @quarague In general, more secular people are more liberal, but religious belief is not the sole determinate of political belief.
May 21, 2023 at 7:48 comment added quarague @ohwilleke You again just wrote that religion and politics are correlated without specifying which way the correlation is. From you argument you seem to use more secular goes with more conservative and more religious goes with more liberal. I would have assumed the correlation goes exactly the other way but I don't have a source either way.
May 20, 2023 at 20:50 comment added ohwilleke♦ @quarague My point is that while religion and political beliefs are correlated, they aren't perfectly correlated. STEM field academics are ore secular but also have more apolitical professional lives. Non-STEM academics are less secular but have professional lives that are more engaged with matters of political content. While both matter somewhat, it turns out that the content of one's professional life is a more powerful factor than one's religious views, at least among academics. But for the fact that STEM academics were so secular, you'd expect them to lean neutral or mildly conservative.
May 20, 2023 at 19:48 comment added quarague @ohwilleke Can you explain your point about religious belief? I would have assumed the correlation is more religous goes with more conservative? In that case the more secular STEM disciplines should be more liberal than the more religious humanities but the survery shows just the opposite.
May 20, 2023 at 16:37 vote accept Paul Johnson
May 19, 2023 at 23:23 comment added ohwilleke♦ FWIW, trends related to how religious academics are also vary by discipline but differently. Scientists are more secular than humanities faculty, for example. Religious belief and politics are correlated, however, which may be part of the reason for some liberal tilt even in relatively more conservative STEM disciplines. Also worth noting that a minority of higher ed institutions are much more conservative than the average. There is a strong "campus" effect.
May 19, 2023 at 18:54 history answered dan04 CC BY-SA 4.0