Political background and identification of US professors circa 1969

Previously, we've seen that upper income Jews in Boston voted much further left than Protestant Bostonians in the middle of the 20th century; that "Boston Brahmins" were a relatively conservative group; that Jewish billionaires are further left than non-Jewish billionaires; etc.

It should not come as much of a surprise to anyone passingly familiar with non-Moldbuggist American history that in a 1969 survey of professors, Jews reported themselves more leftist in parental background, personal identification, voting behavior, and their children's activism than Protestants.

In "Jewish academics in the United States", Lipset reports:

The extent to which the political background of Jewish academics differs from that of others may be seen in the responses to the Carnegie survey question: "What were your father's politics while you were grow- ing up?" Forty-six per cent of the Jews, as contrasted to 19 per cent of the Catholics and but 14 per cent of the Protestant majority, reported fathers who were "left" or "liberal" in their views. Conversely, less than 20 per cent of the Jewish professors had "conservative" fathers, while 63 per cent of the Protestant academics indicated such a background (Table 19).

Family political-intellectual tradition affects the behavior of the chil- dren of academics. Among those faculty with children of college age, a majority (56 per cent) of the Jews report that their children have "been active in civil rights, anti-Vietnam, or other demonstrations," as con- trasted with little more than one-fifth (22 per cent) of the Gentile pro- fessors. The reason, of course, is that the children of liberal academics participate much, much more in demonstrations than children of con- servative academics, and Jewish faculty are disproportionately liberal. That the correlation is between parental politics and participation is made clear by Table 20, which shows that 68 per cent of the left faculty having children of the right age—regardless of religion—said their children had been active in demonstrations, compared to just 4 per cent of the strongly conservative professors.

The contribution of faculty of Jewish background to liberal and left political groups has been stressed in a number of surveys preceding our own. Almost all earlier studies found that close to 90 per cent of Jewish academics regularly voted Democratic in presidential elections. 45 Jewish faculty also were found to contribute heavily to the backing of leftist third parties. Thus, according to a 1948 study, fully 30 per cent of the Jewish professors voted for Henry Wallace. 46 The same proclivity can be seen in Britain, where a faculty opinion study reported that the Jews were "the most left-wing of all." 47 Recent studies of American college professors conclude that Jews have been much more heavily opposed to the Vietnam war, and stronger supporters of student activism, than their Gentile colleagues. 48

The Carnegie Commission's national survey yielded the same strong relationships. The Jewish faculty were much more inclined to identify their politics as "left" or "liberal" than Protestants and Catholics (Table 21 ). 49 Jews contributed disproportionately to the small group who backed left-wing third party presidential candidates in 1968; they were much more likely to have been for the nomination of Eugene McCarthy than of Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic convention, and gave Richard Nixon an exceptionally low vote in the election. In 1964 only 2 per cent of the Jewish faculty voted for Barry Goldwater, compared to 24 per cent of those of Protestant parentage (Tables 22, 23, and 24).

The Jews, as a group, took much more liberal positions on such issues as the use of force at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, the Vietnam war, student activism, the treatment of blacks in both the university and the larger society, and the legalization of marijuana (Tables 25, 26 and 27). The gap between Jews and Christians on these issues is very large, while among Christians, Protestants are usually slightly more conservative than Catholics. For example, 59 per cent of the Jews gave general approval to "the emergence of radical student activism in recent years," compared to 44 per cent of the Catholics and 40 per cent of the Protestants. The proportion of Jews favoring immediate United States withdrawal from Vietnam is twice that of non-Jews. Three- fifths of the Jews favored the legalization of marijuana (59 per cent), compared to 33 per cent of the Catholics and 29 per cent of the Protestants.