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Research Shows Student Affairs Admins Lean Further Left Than Professors

Research Shows Student Affairs Admins Lean Further Left Than Professors

“should give our students and their families pause”

As you read this, remember that the number of college administrators has exploded in recent years.

Inside Higher Ed reports:

Student Affairs Leaders Lean Left

While the liberal leanings of professors have been well documented, the political affiliations of administrators have not been explored so thoroughly — at least until now. And perhaps unsurprisingly, this new research suggests that student affairs officials wing even further to the left than do faculty members.

The analysis comes from a moderate-conservative professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, Samuel J. Abrams, who wrote in an essay in The New York Times on Tuesday that he was taken aback at “politically lopsided” programming at his institution that he said seemed to only capture a liberal viewpoint.

He decided to survey student affairs professionals — 900 “student-facing” administrators across the country, at public and private colleges and universities both large and small, and two- and-four year institutions, to identify political affiliation. Abrams found that liberal student affairs leaders outnumbered conservatives 12 to one, with only 6 percent of administrators indicating they were conservative versus 71 percent identifying as liberal or very liberal.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Abrams said he worked with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago this year to carefully develop the survey sample. Previously, he has relied on data from Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, to determine that liberal professors are far more common than conservatives by a six-to-one ratio.

Abrams said in his interview that early on, students are exposed to an entirely liberal tenor, starting with orientation week classes.

“This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause,” Abrams wrote in the Times.

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Comments

Of course, it isn’t surprising. Their very economic ecosytem depends on the progressive persuasions that love to throw tax money at colleges bloating their budgets to hire more middling managers.