Are universities hotbeds of left-wing bias?

Universities are teaching students to think critically and analyse the evidence before them, hopefully they will apply the same approach to politics as they do to the subject that they are studying. That's a good thing... unless you happen to be a politician whose self-interest and ideology is not robust enough to cope with challenge and debate. This is the root of the right wing disquiet... not that university teachers tend to be left-wing, but that they equip students with the tools to challenge those that wish to occupy positions of power.

To be sure, if left-leaning politicians were as concerned as right-leaning politicians evidently are about increasing the percentage of the population who had been trained to think critically and analyze the evidence before them, then they would be just as scared of education intended to provide such training as right-leaning politicians. However, in fact, the evidence is that right-leaning politicians are more scared of such education. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that the evidence indeed suggests that right-leaning politicians currently believe they have more to lose from a voting population that thinks critically and analyzes evidence than do left-leaning politicians. Nevertheless, we might all well agree with the proposition that all politicians want power -- but, accepting this premise, it then leads to a further conclusion that either fear of or desire for quality public education is not necessarily inherent in the relative "rightness" or "leftness" of political beliefs themselves, but in the strategies by which politicians (of whatever stripe) think they can best gain power. This in turn leads to the additional conclusion (insofar as we might wish to draw conclusions based solely on some casual thought-experiments in the comments section of a Web page) that right-leaning politicians themselves believe (or have chosen a strategy based on the belief that) a critically thinking, evidence-analyzing population is inimical to they ability to acquire and hold power. In other words, the perceived problem is perhaps not one derived from simple "politics" but of how one believes power is most easily taken and maintained. Perhaps further research is needed to consider _why_ right-leaning politicians have chosen to believe this?

Errata: they ability > their ability.

I think that this simple two-dimensional description of ideology does not service sensible debate. The real fight is not "left-wing" versus "right-wing", "socialism" versus "capitalism", but extremism versus moderation. One can find examples of disgraceful and extreme behaviour from all wings of the political spectrum, and these are far too often used as cudgels, deflecting debate away from the issues at hand.

What a lot of words. Anyway, as anyone knows who works in or studies at a UK university, academics, especially in humanities and social science have a much greater left wing preference than society as a whole. Collecting evidence to prove this would be a gratuitous distraction from the debate we are not having about the role this has played in creating a dangerous and increasingly divided nation. My view is that the closed shop should be opened up.

This article focuses exclusively on professors and, in so doing, does capture the true picture. It would be best to mention the far-left student unions, which do not represent the student body and instead act akin to a political party. Only, students are forced to fund them. Moreover, these associations, which wrongly claim to represent the entirety of the student body, pressure the administration into caving into their demands. Unchallenged, they grow more and more extreme in their views.

"Perhaps claims of ideological bias in higher education are more about the anxieties of modern conservatism than about universities themselves – about perceived loss of cultural hegemony to the left, about the right’s anxieties over social liberalism." I only wish the author put these sentences at the beginning so his viewpoint is clear from the start. Liberal politicians almost always turn down debate request from conservatives. And violence break out whenever conservative speakers come to college campus to give speech but not vice versa. THE is left-leaning - like most journalists and the organizations they are associated with. Young people are more liberal, regardless of education background as it says in the article -- because of what this article doesn't address - the K-12 public schools in the US or in UK, are controlled predominately by left-leaning teacher unions. There are lot of logical gaps in this article. Lot and lot of words but it lacks substance.

The anti British far left middle classes have made British universities a bad place for us working classes and even in my civil engineering course far left identity politics have infected the subject and being a proud military veteran I get loads of trouble well did till they discovered that I will always fight when attacked a being working class veteran no middle class leftists can take me or even outwit me the hatred for the working classes is staggering at British universities or as I have found them to be anti British far left training camps