Amidst the recent climate of political correctness run amok, "safe spaces" and protests to draw attention to racism and "micro-aggression," sometimes it seems as though college campuses are absolutely void of professors and administrators that could potentially introduce today's spoiled students to an alternative political mindset. And for the most part, that is indeed the case.
However a new book, "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, has found that there are a few schools that have at least made some effort to diversify the ideological makeup in their ivory towers.
Author Jon A. Shields, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and his coauthor, Joshua Dunn, conducted an extensive study and found that while liberal professors still vastly outnumber conservative or libertarian professors, several schools in the South and a few Catholic universities have clearly made a concerted effort to include conservative voices in their academic departments.
"Among top public universities, the University of Virginia, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas are unusually diverse. Virginia boasts at least one right-wing professor in its departments of government, history, literature, and sociology. Some of these professors are even culturally conservative."
Some Catholic Universities also made the list, including Notre Dame University, Catholic University and Boston College.
Claremont McKenna College is remarkably diverse for a university, where 13 percent of the faculty are registered Republicans. While 13 percent may still seem like an insignificant number, it's a far cry from the norm. The authors couldn't find a single conservative faculty member at several of the schools they studied, including Pitzer College and Scripps College (both in California).
The book is just the first in a broader study into political diversity on college campuses. The authors, in conjunction with their blog Heterodox Academy, intend to examine public records in order to determine the percentage of faculty who give money to Democratic political candidates compared to Republican candidates.