UCLA Today: Female faculty shifting left politically


		BY SHAENA ENGLE UCLA Today An increasing number of faculty women are leaning to the left politically, according to a new UCLA study of more than 55,000 faculty and administrators at 416 schools nationwide on topics ranging from political interest to tenure. While the percentage of faculty overall identifying as either “liberal” or “far left” has grown from 42% to 48% since 1989, that percentage among women has gone from 45% to 54%. Among men, 44% identified themselves in that category. The shift among women faculty “may be attributable to their dissatisfaction with the Republican Party’s current position on issues that often impact women’s lives more directly, such as abortion, welfare and equal rights,” said Jennifer Lindholm, associate director of the Higher Education Research Institute’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program and lead author of the faculty survey. Elsewhere on the political spectrum, 34% of college and university faculty identified themselves as “middle-of-the-road,” down from 40% in 1989, and 18% said they were “conservative” or “far right.” Among the survey’s other findings: Today’s faculty indicated greater attentiveness to students’ overall well-being, saying that colleagues are more interested in students’ academic problems (83%, up from 76%) and personal problems (78%, up from 74%). Forty-six percent (up from 34%) agreed that it is easy for students to meet with professors outside of regular office hours. Ninety-one percent of faculty agreed that a diverse student body enhances students’ educational experience, while 60% endorsed enhancing students’ knowledge of other racial and ethnic groups as an “essential” or “very important” goal for undergraduates. Fifty percent of faculty place and collect course assignments on the Internet (up from 36% in 1998) and 9% have taught a course exclusively on the Internet (up from 2% in 1998). Despite an ongoing debate on the viability of tenure, faculty support for the system continues to rise, with the majority of both tenured and non-tenured faculty disagreeing with the statement that “tenure is an outmoded concept,” and increasingly agreeing that “tenure is essential to attract the best minds to academe. The 2001-02 faculty survey is the fifth triennial survey conducted since 1989 by the Higher Education Research Institute, housed at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html