The Harvard Crimson published its annual survey on Monday of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The survey, conducted in April, found that 80 percent of the faculty members say they are liberal. The poll asked the question to 1,182 faculty members; 476 faculty members responded to the survey. Among the findings, 45.03 percent of the faculty identified as “liberal” while 37.43 percent identified as “very liberal,” an eight percentage point increase from the year before for the “very liberal” category. With that jump, it is clear that Harvard is making no attempt to hire more ideologically diverse faculty members. A mere 16.8 percent identified as “moderate.” Perhaps not so surprisingly, a minuscule 1.46 percent of the faculty identified as “conservative,” while none identified as “very conservative.” This kind of imbalance may result in conservatism being an alien ideology in the Department of Arts & Sciences and the SEAS at Harvard. Liberal professors’ domination of the classrooms almost certainly guarantees that views held by half of the country are not given adequate attention.
When questioned whether they would favor employing more conservative-leaning professors in order to increase intellectual diversity among the faculty, only a quarter of professors said they would. A full 31 percent opposed hiring more conservative professors, while 44 percent said they neither supported nor opposed such a move.
Harvard is a member of the Ivy League, which does tend to skew far to the left. However, this isn’t just a survey of social-science and art professors, many of whom one would reasonably assume to be members of the far Left. This survey includes professors of engineering and the hard sciences. Conservatives assumed for years that this contingent was more moderate and that wokeness would not infiltrate the hard sciences. They were wrong. There has been an abundance of evidence in the past couple of years about wokeness permeating the sciences.
The political perspectives of professors can and do seep into classes of every subject on a daily basis. The fact that the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the professors at the SEAS at Harvard are so heavily weighted in one direction, and there is an unwillingness among the professors to want to change that, speaks volumes about how students are most likely being influenced by their professors’ political leanings. This is another example of a university sorely lacking in viewpoint diversity and refusing to fulfill its role of serving as a marketplace of ideas.