Maine’s higher ed professors disproportionately Democrats

(The Center Square) – The majority of professors in Maine’s higher education are registered Democrats, with fewer than 6% being Republicans. If professors teach responsibly, political affiliation doesn’t matter; but quite often they don’t, a professor of politics says.

“Only 5.49% of university and college professors working in Maine are registered Republicans,” while 54.63% are registered Democrats, according to an analysis by The Maine Wire.

The missing nearly 40% is made up of several different groups: 20.29% are unregistered, which likely means “non-citizen professors, visiting professors from out of state, and the apolitical,” according to the Maine Wire’s analysis.

And 16.28% are unaffiliated, meaning they “are registered to vote but declined to register explicitly with any party.”

The Green Party, No Labels Party, Libertarian party, and 18 indeterminable professors make up the remaining percentage.

The analysis was conducted “using a combination of publicly available information and a voter information database,” The Maine Wire said.

The analysis included 2,222 lecturers and professors at Maine’s major private institutions – Bowdoin College, Bates College, Colby College, Husson University, Saint Joseph’s College and Thomas College – and all of the publicly funded UMaine system universities, according to The Maine Wire.

With no registered Republican professors, UMaine Law possesses the smallest percentage of conservatives. Meanwhile, The University of Maine at Presque Island has the most Republican professors at 29.41%, The Maine Wire reported. The University of Maine at Machias has the highest amount of registered Democrats at 80%, according to the investigation’s spreadsheet.

When asked why he thinks more Maine professors are Democrat than Republican, Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Samuel Abrams told The Center Square on a phone interview that there are many reasons.

“First and foremost, most people who have masters degrees or higher tend to be liberal, left-of-center, or registered [Democrat],” Abrams said.

The self-described center-right professor also said that the disproportionate political makeup is because the higher ed universe possesses “such a strong liberal mono-culture.”

“There are very few spaces for us,” Abrams said. “It is not a secret that people who hold different views are not welcome, are not wanted, and to succeed and to thrive in higher ed is very challenging.”

Being a professor in higher education is “not an easy or obvious career path for people who are not left-of-center, sadly,” Abrams said.

Abrams told The Center Square that possessing a majority of left-leaning professors “doesn’t have to mean that our education is unbalanced at all,” but that it unfortunately often does.

“In and of itself, I could care less if the person is progressive – or extremely conservative, quite frankly – if they teach responsibly,” Abrams said. “Here’s the problem: they don’t.”

Abrams said that in the past, professors valued teaching in a balanced manner. However, today the pervading belief is that “if you’re an academic, you can’t just be impartial.” Instead, “you must be impassioned,” and the thing you’re passionate about is often “social change,” Abrams said.

Abrams told The Center Square that it is important students hear both political sides of an issue for the creation and perfection of ideas. “We become stronger, clearer thinkers when we have to explain ourselves, defend ourselves, and really justify why we think what we think,” Abrams said.

Not talking through both sides of an argument “really undermines what has made [America’s] universities the best in the world for years and what’s made this country so darn prolific and productive over the years,” Abrams said.

If the nation’s students aren’t taught to hear and understand both sides, not only will “weird policy outcomes” potentially happen, but students will be “robots,” not “thinkers,” Abrams said. “They’re not going to be able to keep this tradition of innovation alive, and that really would be a disaster for all of us.”