POLITICAL ORIENTATION OF GRADUATE STUDENTS IN ENGINEERING, THE SCIENCES, AND THE HUMANITIES: ANALYSIS OF A NATIONAL SURVEY

Previous research has documented systematic differences in political orientation among professional groups. The research presented in this dissertation explores the political differences among a subsample of 8,933 graduate students in engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, and fine arts who were surveyed in 1969 by The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and The American Council on Education. Specific hypotheses were tested to ascertain to what extent changes in political orientation occurred as a function of time in graduate school and participation in professional organizations and related activities. The academic discipline groupings were found to be reasonably homogeneous with respect to such measures of political orientation as percentage of respondents liberal-left within their constituent fields of study, except for the fine arts, which were scattered across the range. The engineering students were the most conservative grouping, followed by the natural sciences. The social sciences were found to be the most liberal-left grouping, with the humanities slightly less so. When comparisons were made of first-year graduate students, engineers were significantly less liberal-left than were those in the natural sciences, who were, in turn, significantly less liberal-left than those in the humanities. The first-year students in the social sciences were only slightly more liberal-left than those in the humanities. Since no hypotheses were tested for fine arts students, they were not included in this comparison. First-year students were compared to those in the third year of graduate school and beyond. While the advanced students tended to be somewhat more liberal-left, the association between time in graduate school and political orientation was too weak to be interpreted as significant for any discipline grouping. When index scores computed from participation in professional organizations and activities were used as an independent variable, the associations with political orientation tended to be weak or non-existent. Thus, the available evidence seems to suggest that differences in political orientation among graduate students in this subsample from a national survey were largely the result of the selection processes taking place during undergraduate education and before and not due to socialization during graduate school. These findings must be viewed in the context of high percentages of liberal-left students in the subsample, perhaps a reflection of the political and social changes characteristic of the decade in which the survey was conducted. Other variables were examined for sources of variation in political orientation. A weak association was found for the rural-urban background variable, with those growing up in urban areas somewhat more liberal-left. Jewish students tended to be more liberal-left than those brought up in Christian denominations, although the association was only marginally significant. Father's political orientation was moderately associated (gamma = .40) with respondent's political orientation, indicating some transmission of political attitudes within the family. None of the other variables examined, including age, sex, and social class, appeared to be related to political orientation among the dissertation subsample.