Anyone who has seen those election maps broken down by counties can see how geographically concentrated Democratic voters are, much to their party's electoral disadvantage--once you move past narrow bands on the east and west coasts, there is a vast sea of red in between.
Except for two kinds of blue pinpricks--the densely populated inner cities of Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, etc., and the counties in which large universities are located.
An interesting exploration of the extent to which the latter tilt leftward was provided after the election by two social scientists, Shannon Najmabadi and Katherine Knott, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, under the headline "Yes, you're right, colleges are liberal bubbles."
Their methodology was as simple as it was efficient: compare the election returns of counties where "flagship" state universities are found to the election returns for their states as a whole. That college towns voted for Hillary Clinton was predictable--academics have long been identified as the most left-leaning occupational group among the "chattering classes," even more so than journalists--but the degree of the tilt was still remarkable.
The usual suspects reliably came through in the data: the counties in which the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor are found went for Hillary by 63.4 percent, 48 percent, and 41.5 percent respectively (even though Donald Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan by narrow margins).
Although Trump easily carried Texas, Ohio and Iowa, he lost in lopsided fashion in the counties where their flagship universities reside, by 38.9 percent for the University of Texas, 25.9 percent for the Ohio State University, and 38.2 percent for the University of Iowa.
The most astounding disparity was for Prince George's County, where the University of Maryland at College Park is found and which favored Clinton 89.3 percent to 8.3 percent, thereby perhaps also revealing the biases of federal government employees.
Other massive disparities were found for Kansas (Trump won the state by 21 percent but lost the county of its flagship university by 32.7 percent), North Carolina (Trump won that state by 3.8 percent but lost in the county the Tar Heels play basketball in by a whopping 51 percent), and South Carolina (Trump won statewide by 14.1 percent but lost in the University of South Carolina's county by 32.9 percent).
Overall, of the 49 cases analyzed by Najmabadi and Knott, the only ones where Trump's performance in flagship university counties was better than in the state a whole were the home counties of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Maine, neither of which much resembles the typical land-grant research university.
Included among the nine (out of the 49) flagship university counties that Trump ended up winning was Arkansas' Washington County, but even then, and typically, Trump's margin of victory in Razorback land was well below that in the state as a whole (10.2 percent compared to 26.6 percent).
It is possible, in considering such data, that the particularly toxic nature of the Trump candidacy produced an even bigger skew than usual toward the Democratic side on campuses, but the hunch is that neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney fared much better and that it is more anti-conservative, anti-Republican animus than anxiety over The Donald, or even affection for Democrats, that guides such outcomes.
A couple of other inferences can be made (apart from that academics don't much like Republicans, and that there aren't, accordingly, many Republicans in academe), including that the data almost certainly understates the actual level of leftward skew on college campuses--after all, if one assumes that most residents of a given county that aren't employed at the university are less liberal, perhaps considerably so, than those who are, then the vote totals for faculty/staff only in those counties probably tilted even more dramatically Democratic.
One could extrapolate a bit further when contemplating both the nature of such large research universities and their academic programs and the available data on ideological leanings within different branches of academe.
Large research universities invariably offer business, professional, and engineering components, perhaps even medical, dental, and pharmacy schools and a host of related health-care majors, wherein the ideological leanings of faculty tend to be more conservative than those in the humanities, social sciences and fine arts. Which also means that the ideological skew of faculty and staff at smaller, private liberal arts colleges centered on the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts is likely even more leftward than in the large public state universities analyzed by Najmabadi and Knott.
For most of us, the data presented in the study suggests a disturbing ideological insularity and conformity in academe that makes a mockery of all the blather about diversity.
But for the left, the campus has become an oasis of moral enlightenment and a refuge from our dawning fascist age, which, from the left's overly-heated rhetoric, apparently arrived about 9 on the evening of Nov. 8.
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 01/02/2017