Professors and Their Politics

2. Political Liberalism and Graduate School Attendance: A Longitudinal Analysis

Graduate and professional education—the training and certification of students beyond the baccalaureate level—is a crucial part of the American higher education enterprise. As of 2010, more than 1.8 million people were enrolled in graduate or professional degree programs in the United States. The number of graduate and professional degree students grew at a rate of about 4 percent per year over the preceding decade (N. Bell 2010), and data from the General Social Survey (GSS) show that by 2008, the percentage of American adults with advanced degrees had more than doubled since the 1970s, reaching just over 9 percent. These increases have probably been driven by several factors, including declining relative returns to the upper middle class of a bachelor’s degree alone, changes in the life course and the temporal structuring of careers, and the continued lure of the United States for foreign students. But they also reflect the coming to maturity of a knowledge economy (Powell and Snellman 2004) and are tied to the proliferation of occupational roles requiring advanced technical knowledge and expertise. While graduate education is sociologically significant in several respects, in this chapter we examine it from the standpoint of an interest in occupational politics, or the question of why workers in different occupations have the political views and allegiances they do. Although some occupations that require advanced degrees tend to be conservative, such as the medical profession, overall there is a strong association between the political liberalism of a field and the proportion of its workers who have undergone graduate or professional training. For example , GSS data show that of the ten most liberal major occupations in the United States from 1996 to 2008, five required advanced degrees of most workers, and two that did not—authors/journalists and creative artists—nevertheless had rates of advanced degree holding twice that of the general population. These aggregate patterns reflect the fact that liberal self-identification, Democratic Party c h a p t e r t w o Political Liberalism and Graduate School Attendance A Longitudinal Analysis ethan fosse, jeremy freese, and neil gross 54 Explaining Professorial Liberalism affiliation and voting, and more progressive social and economic attitudes are correlated with advanced degree holding at the individual level. Sociologists have long been aware of such associations, invoking them to help account for the liberalism of “New Class” occupations and the emergence of political cleavages around science and education (Brint 1984, 1985; Gerteis 1998; Manza and Brooks 1997; Manza, Hout, and Brooks 1995; Meyer et al. 2007). But the underlying explanations have remained unclear. Is there an intrinsic link between liberalism and intelligence, such that the more liberal views of those with advanced degrees reflect liberals’ greater academic potential (Deary, Batty, and Gale 2008; Kanazawa 2010)? Do workers with advanced education tend to be more liberal because further cognitive development occurs with additional years of schooling, leading the intelligentsia to find fault with what they come to see as simplistic conservative ideologies? Does the liberalism of the highly educated reflect a collective effort at differentiation from both the middle-class and business elites (Bourdieu 1988 [1984]; Lamont 1987, 1992)? Or have those with liberal views come to so completely dominate the knowledge work fields that they refuse to hire colleagues with dissenting opinions (Klein and Stern 2009; Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte 2005)? To make headway with these questions, we examine the connection between advanced education and liberalism in one important occupation: the American professoriate. As chapter 1 of this volume shows, professors and instructors in higher education, who comprise about 1 percent of the U.S. workforce but exercise social influence disproportionate to their numbers, tend to have political views to the left of other Americans. Although scholars have advanced numerous theories to explain the politics of professors, a recent study by Fosse and Gross (2012), using GSS data, demonstrated that the main factor accounting for professors’ politics is simply that most have doctoral or other advanced degrees. This study also proposed a theory to account for the connection between graduate school attendance and liberal political identification among professors: the theory that over the course of the twentieth century, the professoriate acquired a reputation as a liberal occupation, and young liberals today, acting on the basis of this reputation and seeking careers that accord with their political identities, are more likely than conservatives to aspire to become academics and get the...