The Politics of the Professoriate: A Social Media Approach

Institutions of higher education in the United States, and the faculty members that comprise them, are regularly accused of being overly liberal. These criticisms have material impacts on higher education as a field, as investment and public higher education policy is increasingly tied to partisan perceptions of higher education. This study offers a contemporary assessment of the politics of the professoriate, using digital trace data and computational methods to evaluate the politics of 4,169 faculty across 542 institutions, and explores whether there are political differences with respect to field, subfield, and tenure status.