As part of the “Polar Poll” of Bowdoin students that I run in my Quantitative Analysis in Political Science course, we asked students and faculty this spring to assess their political ideology on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being very liberal and 100 being very conservative.  The results are displayed below. (The data have 250 student responses plus 60 faculty responses; this represents about 15 percent of all enrolled students and 25 percent of faculty.)  Faculty are slightly to the left of students, but the shape of the distributions are similar, such that there is very little conservative presence.  Still, as perhaps we might expect, conservative faculty are less prevalent on campus than conservative students.  Food for thought.