Zero Republicans Found in Seven Humanities Departments at NC State University

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on October 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission.

There are zero identifiable Republican professors in at least seven of the humanities majors at North Carolina State University, a College Fix analysis found.

The Fix found 158 Democrats and 8 Republicans teaching in the 10 humanities majors reviewed. The Fix used North Carolina’s voter registration database. There were also 37 “unaffiliated,” one “No Labels” and 27 unknowns. In total, The Fix reviewed 231 humanities professors and found affiliations for 204 people.

The Fix also verified identifying information via public sources such as academic papers and resumes. Republicans were outnumbered in every department, even several business majors reviewed, except accounting.

The analysis only included professors, including associate professors and assistant professors within each department, but not graduate student teaching assistants or professor emeriti.

Professors who teach in multiple departments were only counted once in their primary discipline to protect their privacy and to avoid double counting. There may be crossover in some departments as professors are listed in one department but may teach classes under another major.

Many professors are identified as “unaffiliated” but have voted exclusively in Republican or Democratic primary elections. These were added to the overall count of Republicans and Democrats. The Fix could not identify the political affiliation of every professor.

No Republicans were found in the communications, interdisciplinary studies, philosophy and religious studies, political science, social work, public administration, and sociology and anthropology departments. The most lopsided department was History with 29 Democrats and one Republican.

The Fix also reviewed four business school programs. While each department had at least one Republican, and accounting had more GOP members than Democrats, the results were still tilted. The Fix identified 28 Democrats across the economics, management, business management, and accounting majors. By contrast, there were 20 Republicans.

Conservative education professor says results ‘concern him’

Professor Stephen Porter told The College Fix the lack of conservatives in the surveyed departments “does concern” him. Porter writes about education and sued his own university in 2021, alleging retaliation for criticizing diversity programs.

“A number of scholars have written about the problems with an ideological monoculture amongst faculty,” according to Porter, who teaches in the College of Education. “Not only does it affect academic disciplines, but the university atmosphere as well.”

“When almost all of your professors are vocal leftists, centrist and conservative students become reluctant to express their opinion in class or in assignments,” Porter told The Fix.

An appeals court ruled against Porter last summer, defending the university’s decision to remove him from a top education department role and alarming free speech watchdogs. The Supreme Court declined to take his case in January.

Political science head says results ‘not at all relevant’

The Fix emailed ten departments that were found to have the most uneven political makeup to ask if they are open to recruiting efforts aimed at conservative scholars.

The heads of world languages and cultures, sociology and anthropology, social work, public administration, psychology, English, history, philosophy and religious studies, and communications did not respond in the past week.

Professor Michael Struett, who chairs the political science department, disputed The Fix’s research. “Those answers don’t accurately reflect the political views of members of my department,” he said via email.

“There are 2 members of my department who lean Republican ideologically, which I am only aware of because of my personal interactions with those individuals,” Struett told The Fix. “It is not anything I would ever have had occasion to notice in our professional interactions.”

Struett said voting records “cannot give you any detail about their voting behavior in general elections or really even in primaries.”

“It is worth pointing out that personal political ideology is generally not at all relevant to how political science research is done, or how one teaches the major arguments in political science,” Struett told The Fix. “All of my colleagues represent a wide variety of types of theoretical perspectives when they teach students how to analyze politics.”

The professor rejected the idea of trying to increase the representation of conservatives.

“We recruit scholars consistently for the excellence of their produced research and their skill at conveying a broad section of the political science literature to students effectively,” he said. “We rarely or never discuss or consider the personal political ideology of people we hire, and certainly would never announce an intention to hire someone of any particular political ideology.

“Nor has any one in our department ever expressed such a preference to hire on ideological grounds,” Struett said.

Porter, the conservative education professor, was also skeptical of targeting conservatives as recruits – but for different reasons.

“I don’t think it makes sense to have a quota for Republicans; party registration is just a proxy for limited viewpoint diversity, and if [the] university instituted some kind of quota in hiring, smart professors looking for employment would temporarily switch their party registration until they got a job and then just switch back,” Porter told The Fix.

The scholar added that faculty hiring committees may “discriminate based on viewpoint, because the hiring process takes place in individual departments scattered across the university … having the central administration play a stronger oversight role in faculty hiring would be helpful.”

Porter said the university’s problem has no easy solution. “Ensuring fair representation of viewpoints will be very difficult to achieve,” he told The Fix.

This is the latest College Fix report to find a gap between Democratic and Republican professors in humanities departments.

For example, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has six humanities departments without any identifiable Republicans. In total, there are 203 identified Democrats compared to just six Republicans, an article last week reported.

Similarly, there are six humanities departments at University of Oklahoma without any Republican professors, according to a review of 13 majors in total, a report last week from The Fix found.

The Fix is not publishing the spreadsheet of professors so as to protect the identity of Republican professors.

Breakdown of Colleges of Humanities and Social Sciences:

Communications:
Dem: 11
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 2
Unknown: 1

English:
Dem: 22
Rep: 4
Unaffiliated: 3
Unknown: 8

History:
Dem: 29
Rep: 1
Unaffiliated: 1
Unknown: 4

Interdisciplinary Studies:
Dem: 20
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 8
Unknown: 2

Philosophy and Religious Studies:
Dem: 7
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 6
Unknown: 1
No Labels: 1

Psychology:
Dem: 14
Rep: 1
Unaffiliated: 7
Unknown: 1

Political Science:
Dem: 11
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 0
Unknown: 3

Public Administration:
Dem: 10
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 2
Unknown: 0

Social Work:
Dem: 6
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 0
Unknown: 1

Sociology and Anthropology:
Dem: 15
Rep: 0
Unaffiliated: 2
Unknown: 4

World Languages and Cultures:
Dem: 13
Rep: 2
Unaffiliated: 6
Unknown: 2

Breakdown of College of Management:

Economics:
Dem: 6
Rep: 2
Unaffiliated: 4
Unknown: 1

Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship:
Dem: 7
Rep: 3
Unaffiliated: 4
Unknown: 2

Business Management:
Dem: 10
Rep: 8
Unaffiliated: 4
Unknown: 3

Accounting:
Dem: 5
Rep: 7
Unaffiliated: 3
Unknown: 1
Libertarian: 1

Image of “Brickyard” at NC State University in Raleigh — Picryl