"Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find"

John Tierney in the NY Times has an interesting article on new studies on the lack of political diversity in academia.

"a national survey of more than 1,000
academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber
Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and
social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided
as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to
keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are
more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing
retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of
economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the
study. . . . At both [the University of California
system and Harvard], employees gave about $19 to the Kerry
campaign for every dollar for the Bush campaign. . . . The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged
from 3 to 1 among economists to 30 to 1 among
anthropologists. The researchers found a much higher share
of Republicans among the nonacademic members of the
scholars' associations, which Professor Klein said belied
the notion that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly
careers."

Tierney is quite unusual in his writings in the NY Times.

Update: The two papers discussed by Tierney can be found here.