The political views of academics
Chris Heaton-Harris got himself into rather a spot this week because his attempt to find out what was being taught in Universities about Brexit was interpreted as the precursor to some sort of attempt to challenge academic freedom.
There are academics of all political persuasions, but there is some evidence - thought not nearly as strong as is often made out that those who are attracted to an academic career do not break in the same proportions in their views as the population as a whole.
For example there was a massive correlation between level of education and support for "Remain" and the overwhelming majority of academics were pro-"Remain."
The fact that the EU's activities in support of education and research is one of those parts of the organisation which is highly successful undoubtedly had a lot to do with this.
If the rest of the EU's activities worked as well as this part of it does, Leave would have been lucky to get 10% of the vote.
Similarly it is often alleged that academics are more left wing than society as a whole. But is the evidence for this as strong as people think?
There is an interesting study which you can read here, called
"Is the left over-represented within academia?"
by Chris Hanretty who is Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway College. It seems convincing at first until you look at the sample sizes.
It starts off by pointing out that a study suggesting a left-wing bias among academics, the Adam Smith Institute report entitled
“Lackademia: Why Do Academics Lean Left?”.
This survey is repeated in waves, and hanratty has looked at six of them. He says of the way the data is presented
"This allows me to identify all respondents whose current job fell under the heading “College, University, and Higher Education teaching professionals”. The number of respondents in this category varies over successive waves of the Understanding Society survey, but is never lower than 178."
Individually that makes the number of academics in some of the individual waves is far too small for statistical conclusions about the proportion of support for individual political parties to be reliable, although tendancies which are consistent over all six are much more liable to be statistically meaningful.
Unfortunately UKIP was not separated out from "other" in the first four waves, a decision which Hanratty rightly describes as "rather eccentric" and means that although his conclusion based on the final two waves of data that UKIP is under-represented among academics may well be right, the sample size is so small that the degree of statistical confidence in this conclusion is so weak as to be almost worthless as evidence.
The statistical evidence from the Understanding Society survey that academics are less likely to identify with the Conservatives and more likely to identify with Labour than in the population as a whole, however, a result which appears overall in in all six of the individual waves, appears to be much stronger (I can't comment more definitively than that without access to the actual numbers.)
Does any of this actually mean anything important, however?
In my opinion, non except that the Conservatives probably need to work harder to maintain the support we do have among students.
There are academics of all political persuasions, but there is some evidence - thought not nearly as strong as is often made out that those who are attracted to an academic career do not break in the same proportions in their views as the population as a whole.
For example there was a massive correlation between level of education and support for "Remain" and the overwhelming majority of academics were pro-"Remain."
The fact that the EU's activities in support of education and research is one of those parts of the organisation which is highly successful undoubtedly had a lot to do with this.
If the rest of the EU's activities worked as well as this part of it does, Leave would have been lucky to get 10% of the vote.
Similarly it is often alleged that academics are more left wing than society as a whole. But is the evidence for this as strong as people think?
There is an interesting study which you can read here, called
"Is the left over-represented within academia?"
by Chris Hanretty who is Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway College. It seems convincing at first until you look at the sample sizes.
It starts off by pointing out that a study suggesting a left-wing bias among academics, the Adam Smith Institute report entitled
“Lackademia: Why Do Academics Lean Left?”.
was based, to an uncomfortable extent, on the findings of two self-selecting surveys run by the Times Higher Education: one survey from before the 2015 general election and one survey from before the EU membership referendum.
As Hanratty righly points out, self-selecting surveys are generally not a reliable way of ascertaining public or group-specific opinion on an issue. People with strong views, and virtue-signallers, are much more likely to fill them in.
He used instead the Understanding Society survey, which contains information both on closeness to political parties and on occupation. This data also supports the view that left-wing opinions are over-represented within academia, compared to the general population - but fortunately Professor Hanratty did include the size of the sample.
"This allows me to identify all respondents whose current job fell under the heading “College, University, and Higher Education teaching professionals”. The number of respondents in this category varies over successive waves of the Understanding Society survey, but is never lower than 178."
Individually that makes the number of academics in some of the individual waves is far too small for statistical conclusions about the proportion of support for individual political parties to be reliable, although tendancies which are consistent over all six are much more liable to be statistically meaningful.
Unfortunately UKIP was not separated out from "other" in the first four waves, a decision which Hanratty rightly describes as "rather eccentric" and means that although his conclusion based on the final two waves of data that UKIP is under-represented among academics may well be right, the sample size is so small that the degree of statistical confidence in this conclusion is so weak as to be almost worthless as evidence.
The statistical evidence from the Understanding Society survey that academics are less likely to identify with the Conservatives and more likely to identify with Labour than in the population as a whole, however, a result which appears overall in in all six of the individual waves, appears to be much stronger (I can't comment more definitively than that without access to the actual numbers.)
Does any of this actually mean anything important, however?
In my opinion, non except that the Conservatives probably need to work harder to maintain the support we do have among students.
Comments