Economics Prof Warns Academia’s Leftward Shift May Get Worse

Economics Prof Warns Academia’s Leftward Shift May Get Worse

Sadly, this isn’t hard to believe. Just look at what has unfolded on many college campuses over the last year.

Campus Reform reports:

Prof fears academia’s ‘leftward shift’ could get even worse

An economics professor recently warned of the harmful consequences caused by academia’s increasingly leftist tilt.

Phil Magness, who teaches at Berry College in Georgia, recently published an article in Areo Magazine detailing some of the explanations for academia’s shift to the political left over the last two decades.

While the percentage of self-identified liberals in academia had remained fairly consistent for nearly 30 years, at between 40 and 45 percent, Magness notes that the Higher Education Research Institute’s annual survey shows that the numbers began rising in the mid-1990s, reaching 60 percent in the most recent survey conducted in 2013.

After reviewing research from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which tracked academic hiring in the last decade, Magness discovered that one possible explanation is that more professors are being hired in traditionally left-leaning fields.

The data show that the fastest-growing fields over the last decade have been “fine arts (1.82 percentage points), humanities (1.01), and social sciences (0.83),” whereas less politically-charged fields, such as the natural sciences and engineering, have actually lost faculty members during the same period.

“What this basically means is that the most politically skewed disciplines—the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences—have grown their faculty at a faster rate than other less politicized disciplines,” Magness explains.

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