As the debate about the “Academic Bill of Rights” and whether or not liberal professors indoctrinate students or punish conservative students for their beliefs becomes more heated, what we really need is valid and documentable research on the topic one way or the other. I previously wrote about one such study, and here is another -- it shows that conservative students tend to take classes in departments where grades are lower in general and if anything, liberal students tend to get slightly lower grades in these generally “conservative” disciplines:

The more liberal students are, the more likely they are to take courses in fields like sociology and American studies where “questions of social justice” are a focus. Conservative students are more likely to enroll in departments like economics and business. This is a key fact, Kemmelmeir said, because the fields conservatives tend to study are fields where average grades are lower -- across all political groups.

So when conservative students complain that their grades are lower than their liberal friends, they might be right -- but it has nothing to do with bias. In disciplines that tend to attract more liberal students, there was no relationship between students’ politics and the grades they received. The disciplines examined here included sociology, American studies, African-American studies, cultural anthropology, education, nursing and women’s studies.

In disciplines that tend to attract more conservative students (economics and all of the disciplines in business schools), conservatives have a slight edge — the equivalent of 0.25 on a 4-point graduate point average scale.

So in summary, this research again supports the notion that many of us professors have been saying all along -- there is no systematic bias against students just because they happen to disagree with our individual political beliefs. Nonetheless, you can be sure that the right wing critics will conveniently ignore or dismiss studies like this and stick to their divisive and blatantly partisan ideological rhetoric -- the exact same thing that they supposedly criticize “liberal” professors of doing.