In the United States, according to the New York Times, about 60 percent of undergraduate teaching faculty identify as liberal or far left, compared with about 12 percent who identify as conservative or far right. The gap has grown over the past few decades:
It would be good to see what the same graph looks like in NZ. I would expect it was more extreme, given that the US has quite a few, for example, conservative-right wing economics departments, like University of Chicago.
"Why does it exist?", asks the New York Times, "It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because colleges are viewed as liberal institutions, fewer conservatives strive to join their staff. Or it could be that faculty hiring boards discriminate against conservative applicants. And since college graduates are more likely to identify as liberal, the pipeline for conservative professors is narrower".
The political right have mountain of a problem in terms of the education system - even in the US, a systematic biasing of the views of our youth may be underway at a level greater than ever before, at least before records began.
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