Author Profile

Jenna A. Robinson

Jenna Robinson is the president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. She joined the Martin Center in 2007 as campus outreach coordinator and later became the center’s director of outreach. She was previously the E.A. Morris Fellowship assistant at the John Locke Foundation, where she had worked since 2001.

Robinson serves on the board of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance, the steering committee of the Bastiat Society of Raleigh, and as a member of the Board of Visitors at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has previously served as a member of the North Carolina Longitudinal Data System Board, the North Carolina Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the Classical Liberals in the Carolinas.

Robinson earned her bachelor’s degree from NC State University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Robinson also studied at the University of East Anglia and is a graduate of the Koch Associate Program. She has taught courses in American politics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Wake Technical Community College.

Robinson’s work has appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Roll Call, Forbes, American Thinker, Human Events, Carolina Journal, and the Raleigh News & Observer.

Robinson lives in Cary, NC, with her husband and two sons.

Articles by Jenna A. Robinson

Is Leftist Bias on College Campuses a Myth?

Jan 25, 2007 ·

Conventional wisdom has long claimed that campuses are hotbeds of leftist thought with professors far more likely to be Marxists than Republicans. Recent research has taken steps to substantiate these claims. Eight separate studies of faculty politics and campus climate have demonstrated that professors with a leftist philosophy vastly outnumber those with a conservative or libertarian philosophy at four-year universities across the nation. The various studies address two major themes: that faculty members are liberal and that their liberal inclinations can affect classroom performance.

Now, a new study conducted by John B. Lee for the American Federation of Teachers concludes that those studies documenting liberal bias on campus might be incorrect, or at least inconclusive. “The ‘Faculty Bias’ Studies: Science or Propaganda,” takes eight of the recent studies on faculty politics and judges them by five general tests of social science research. According to Lee, “basic methodological flaws keep a critical reader from accepting the conclusions suggested by the authors.”

Unfortunately, Lee misses the point. Instead of refuting the results, Lee devotes his time to dissecting the methods employed by the researchers who have found evidence of leftist domination. Quibbling over details shouldn’t detract from the seriousness of the problem. Whether the number of professors who use their classrooms to peddle their own socio-political views is in the millions or in single digits, it shouldn’t be tolerated at all.