Nearly 80% of college faculty support the Democratic presidential ticket in the upcoming election, according to an Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey released Monday.
Only 8% of faculty surveyed expressed support for former president Donald Trump, while 78% expressed support for Vice President Kamala Harris, the poll shows. More than half of respondents said their politics are “somewhat” or “much” further left than the students on their campus.
Half of those polled said they planned on donating to a campaign, with 67% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans stating this intention. Nearly all those polled said they planned on voting in the November presidential election.
While 15% of Republican survey respondents stated support for the Harris-Walz ticket, there were little to no Democrats claiming support for Trump and Vance, according to the survey. The majority of respondents reported feeling at least “somewhat” concerned about the climate on campus in regard to the upcoming election.
College faculty in recent years have overwhelmingly skewed to the left politically, with only 6% of “student-facing” administrators identifying as conservative in 2017, whereas 71% claimed to be “liberal” or “very liberal,” according to The New York Times. At the University of Virginia, there was only one Republican faculty member for every 24 Democrats, according to an April report by the National Association of Scholars.
Just under a third of faculty surveyed in the new poll said they plan to discuss the upcoming election with students in class, with 20% saying they plan on discussing the election one-on-one with students and 78% saying they plan on encouraging students to vote. Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans in affirmative responses.
The majority of respondents also agreed that politicians are largely to blame for increased tensions on campus regarding speech, with 66% stating this to be the case while 37% answered that university governing boards and administrators are to blame. Few blamed students, faculty and staff.
The survey was conducted from September 16 to October 4 and polled 1,100 college faculty from across the country with a 2.9% margin of error.
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