This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines the politicized atmosphere that has developed at American institutions of higher learning; the leftist campus and professional associations that have been established there; and the key players (professors, administrators, and organizational leaders) who shape the ideological agendas of those institutions and associations.    It is generally accepted that the politicization of the American university began in the 1960s.  Student radicals involved in the University of California's Free Speech Movement in 1964, the opening salvo in what became the student movement, criticized the Berkeley campus as a "multiversity" that worked too closely with other key American institutions such as the Defense Department.  But after a tumultuous decade, many of them returned to school once the revolution they had sought proved to be stillborn, got graduate degrees, got academic positions, and set about giving the university an identity far different from the one it had acquired in the early post-war years; one that was truly political and at odds with much of American society. They are what writer Roger Kimball calls "tenured radicals," and they have made the contemporary university an institutional outpost of leftist thinking and organizing by reshaping disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, and by using control of the hiring process to constitute faculties whose views are uniformly Left, leading to the use of the classroom for purposes of indoctrination, not education.    As liberal columnist Paul Krugman conceded in The New York Times, "It's a fact . . . that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities." A significant body of research confirms Krugman's observation. For instance, a recent survey by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) examined the phenomenon of political bias among faculty at 32 elite colleges and universities, where it found 1,397 professors who were registered Democrats and only 134 who were registered Republicans -- a ratio greater than 10 to 1.  Another CSPC study found that at 10 major law schools in the U.S., 430 professors were registered Democrats and 53 were registered Republicans -- a ratio of more than 8 to 1. The same survey further revealed that at 9 major journalism schools, 120 professors were registered Democrats and 29 were registered Republicans -- a ratio of more than 4 to 1.   A study released in late December 2005 by UC-Santa Clara economics professor Dan Klein found that social science professors are overwhelmingly Democratic, and that Democratic professors in those disciplines are more homogeneous in their thinking than Republicans. On the question of political affiliation, the survey showed an immense imbalance in the breakdown of Democrats to Republicans, ranging from 21.1 to 1 among anthropologists; 9.1 to 1 among political and legal philosophers; 8.5 to 1 among historians; and 5.6 to 1 among political scientists.  Another 2005 study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, titled Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty, found that 72 percent of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as liberal, as compared to only 15 percent who claim to be conservative. According to the study, the most one-sided departments are English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative. "The American College Teacher" a major 2001 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which has never been challenged, posed a number of questions on politics to a nationwide sample of professors. The researchers found that 5.3 percent of faculty members could be classified as far left, and another 42.3 percent as liberal. By contrast, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right.  According to a Fall 2005 paper published in The Georgetown Law Journal, politically active professors at top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats. This study by Northwestern Professor John McGinnis and two co-authors, which covers the faculties of the top 21 law schools listed in the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings, finds that just under a third of the professors at those institutions contributed at least $200 to a federal political campaign over an 11-year period. Of that politically active group, 81 percent contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns, while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans. Relatedly, a comprehensive study by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found that over 90 percent of well-known college campuses have speech codes intended to ban and punish "politically incorrect" speech.  

Such are the issues examined in this section of the database. There is also discussion of leftist bias in the selection of commencement speakers at American colleges; the infiltration of Saudi influence and money in U.S. college curricula; and the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in academia.