College electors, part 3

 I had two previous posts on voting preferences among college students in the 1940s-70s.  This post will look at faculty at two elite universities, Yale and Princeton.   Polls of faculty were less common than polls of students, but were taken in some elections.   In 1948, a poll of Princeton faculty found 47% for Thomas Dewey, 31% for Harry Truman, 16% for Norman Thomas (Socialist), 3% for Henry Wallace (Progressive), and less than 1% (1 out of 220) for Strom Thurmond.  The biggest difference from the national vote was with Thomas, who got only 0.3% in the election.*  I think that some of his support in the poll was sentimental (he was a Princeton graduate) and would have gone to Truman in a real election.  But either way, Princeton faculty were well to the left of the students, who went 70% for Dewey and 10% for Thurmond.  Dewey did better in the sciences and engineering.  

In 1952, 57% of Yale faculty favored Adlai Stevenson and 41% went for Dwight Eisenhower.  Engineering went for Eisenhower by a 3:1 margin, but all of the other schools went for Stevenson, with the Law and Divinity schools especially one-sided (they didn't break it down by department within Arts and Sciences).  The survey also asked about preference in three Senate races, two in Connecticut (one was to fill a vacancy) and one in Wisconsin, where Joe McCarthy was running for re-election.  The results for the Connecticut races were similar to the presidential results, but McCarthy got only 11%, while his Democratic opponent got 82%.

In 1964, 93% of Princeton faculty favored Johnson and only 4% favored Goldwater.  Four of the ten Goldwater supporters in the poll were from Engineering.  The survey also asked about party identification:  55% said they were Democrats, 30% independents, and 15% Republican.  

In 1968, a poll of Princeton faculty found 71% for Hubert Humphrey, 6% for Richard Nixon, 8% for Dick Gregory (Freedom & Peace Party, 0.1% nationwide), and 7% probably wouldn't vote.  The poll also gave space for comments, and "many expressed disenchantment, even disgust, with the choices offered for president."  One physics instructor wrote "I do not support Humphrey-Muskie; I oppose the others.  Wallace, Agnew, and LeMay appeal to the kinds of hatred that put Hitler in power, and Nixon welcomes the fruits of those kinds of hatred."   Engineering gave Nixon his strongest support, although even there he was well behind.  There was no clear difference between the science, humanities, and social science departments--Nixon was below 5% in all.  

Despite the scattered nature of the information, some points are clear.  First, there were differences by field, and they weren't just Humanities and Social Sciences vs. STEM.  This suggests that there is some intrinsic connection between intellectual interests, or certain kinds of intellectual interests, and political views.    Second, there was a big gap between faculty at elite universities and the general public by the late 1960s.  This means that the recent decline in public confidence in higher education isn't a straightforward matter of conservatives reacting to their underrepresentation on university faculties:  if it were, it would have happened long ago. Of course, the general distribution of votes is a not a complete measure of political climate, and you could argue that the decline is a reaction to some other political change on campus, like the rise of DEI.  But if people didn't react to a clear and simple change--the collapse of Republican support among university faculty--it seems unlikely that they would react to a more subtle one.    I think the decline in confidence has been driven by Republican elites:  they became more critical of higher education in recent years, and that has influenced public opinion.    Third, there were large shifts from one election to the next until the 1960s.  From personal observation I'm confident that faculty support for Republican candidates in presidential elections has been consistently low since the 1980s.  But  in 1980 John Anderson, a Republican running as an independent, got a lot of support among students at elite universities.   Anderson represented a strand of Republicanism that was once important but has now disappeared, so that raises a question of how much of the decline of Republican support among university faculty was the result of changes in the Republican party.  That is, when they had an opportunity to pick a liberal/moderate Republican, did they take it?  Unfortunately, I didn't find any faculty polls for the 1980 election.

[Data from the archives of the Daily Princetonian and Yale Daily News]