After years of studying some of the most mysterious minds in academia, Dr Neil Gross, Associate Professor of Sociology at UBC, has become an expert on professors and their political preferences.

Inspired by a conference in Boston, Gross and his colleague Ethan Fosse, a doctorial candidate at Harvard University, have studied over 300 professors to determine the reason behind their liberal political tendencies.

In a paper entitled “Why are Professors Liberal?” Gross and Fosse found that between 1996 and 2008, 42.9 per cent of American professors identified themselves as liberal while only 9.3 per cent identified as conservative.

Professors’ political preferences vary a lot from the other American workers studied, who identified as liberal only 14.2 percent of the time, he explained.

Despite the fact that many researchers have attributed professors’ liberal politics to their high IQs, Gross’s research refutes this claim. He found that professors aren’t necessarily smarter than people in other professions, but rather, as a whole, score higher on factors typically associated with liberalism, such as advanced education, and religious scepticism and tolerance.

Gross’s research also addressed the chicken-and-egg debate of who was liberal first—the person or the profession. It isn’t so much a question of why professors are liberal, but why liberals become professors, he quipped.

So why do professors lean to the left? Or, why do liberals lean towards becoming a professor? As Gross explained, it all comes down to “typing.”

“Our key idea is that the professoriate is a ‘politically typed’ occupation,” said Gross. “By that we mean that, for a variety of reasons, it has acquired a reputation over the decades as an occupation suitable and appropriate for those broadly on the left.”

In academia this “typing” (or association of professors with liberal politics) exists in part because of the energy conservatives have spent complaining about how “liberal” professors are, said Gross.

“This [complaining] is something that’s gone on since at least the 1950s, and the irony is that it’s helped contribute to the stereotype of professors as liberal, which in fact reproduces professorial liberalism,” he said.

Conservative complaining aside, due to the influx of political liberalism in universities and other centres for higher learning, according to Gross, this phenomenon is likely to persist. Although the liberal majority does not affect students directly, Gross argues it will most likely have an effect on the future of academia.

“We think that because of its reputation, academically-inclined liberal students are far more likely than their conservative counterparts to aspire to enter academia, which will continue to reproduce faculty liberalism,” he said.