Debating the Status of Conservatives in US Higher Education

The Objectivist
ARE CONSERVATIVES BEING SHUT OUT OF THE ACADEMY?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
2/15/06

At colleges and universities, conservatives are present in surprisingly few numbers. For example, in one 2004 survey of six academic fields (Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology), the author found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 15 to 1 and estimated that there was an 8 to 1 ratio overall in the social sciences and humanities. The ratio in some fields is much higher: 30.2 to 1 in Anthropology and 28 to 1 in Sociology. This one-sided distribution of professors is also present at elite schools. For example, in 2000 the popular vote in America was roughly evenly divided with George W. Bush and Al Gore each getting 48% of the vote. In contrast, at Ivy League Schools, 80% voted for Gore whereas only 9% voted for Bush.

This effect is probably strengthened in part by features of these colleges or universities that tend to appeal to a leftist worldview. By a leftist worldview, I mean support for higher taxes and larger government, race and gender preferences, gun control, etc. Consider SUNY Fredonia. It has balkanized fields of studies, such as women’s studies, American Indian Studies, and multi-ethnic studies, and administrative departments, such as multicultural affairs and affirmative action, that will not appeal to the political right. It also offers classes such as Education 313: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity Field Experience (where students “incorporate multicultural concepts, including cultural awareness; tolerance and acceptance …”) and English 349: Feminist Theory. Any student in these classes who states his opposition to homosexuality, abortion, or welfare will undoubtedly get a chilly reception.

In addition, there is a strong push to diversify the faculty. This is sometimes implemented by hiring women and minority (specifically black and Hispanic) candidates who are not as good as their competitors. Since these same candidates tend, on average, to be farther left than their competitors, the hiring process tends to push the faculty to the left. So strong is the concern for white-male bias that the University Senate decided last academic year to require that the search committees have adequate numbers of women and racial/ethnic minorities. Apparently, members of the senate thought that a committee made up of only white males can’t be trusted to be fair.

The invited speakers have the same political orientation. This year, for example, Robert Kennedy spoke on environmentalism, but trashed Republicans and corporations along the way. The part of the Fredonia website in which faculty discuss ideas regularly features articles and emails arguing for leftist politics and promoting leftist causes. For example, this year there were calls to join protests of the Iraq War and constant criticisms of Bush for trying to cut taxes and restructure social security.

There is an important issue as to whether the lopsided distribution of leftist faculty and speakers and the presence of academic concentrations with clear-cut political agendas results from the intentional exclusion of conservatives or merely reflects the pool who choose to go into academia or academic administration. My guess is that both effects are present, so in the end it’s not clear whether conservatives are being shut out of the academy. Either way, this pattern hinders the free discussion of ideas and shows the concern for diversity to be nothing more than a mask for a political agenda.

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The Constructivist
CONSERVATIVES SHUT OUT OF THE ACADEMY? PLEASE!
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
2/15/06

There’s a story going around that conservatives are being unfairly excluded from the U.S. higher education system. Such stories have been making the rounds for decades. Have you heard the one that “tenured radicals” have taken over American colleges and universities? Or the one that “thought police” are patrolling the groves of academe enforcing “political correctness”? Even before the days of Fox News and the conservative blogosphere, these stories were spread by conservative organizations like Accuracy in Academia, the Madison Center for Education Affairs, and the National Association of Scholars, journals like National Review, Commentary, and New Criterion, politicians like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, authors like Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, and Roger Kimball, and pundits like George Will and Rush Limbaugh, most with help from conservative foundations like Olin, Bradley, Smith-Richardson, and Coors (see The Myth of Political Correctness and Higher Education under Fire for the details). The latest conservative to make a splash with such stories is David Horowitz, who leads a campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights.

As in all good stories, ironies abound. Just look at the ones on “discrimination against conservatives” and “lack of intellectual diversity” in higher education. Conservatives who have spent two generations fulminating against the rhetoric of victimization and raising the evidentiary bar on race- or gender-based discrimination have spent the last generation portraying themselves as victims of discrimination by leftist academics. Conservatives who supposedly believe in limited government, the benefits of competition, and the dangers of regulation are calling for government intervention on behalf of their ideas and careers. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if long-time conservative opponents of affirmative action are building a case for affirmative action on their own behalf. As Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, points out in a recent issue of Academe, to set up a system whereby conservative professors are hired on the basis of “their political party preference…smacks of Iraqi universities under Saddam Hussein, Soviet universities under Stalin, or Chinese universities today.” Yet this is precisely what the bill reauthorizing the Higher Education Act that’s coming before Congress this year would put into place. Clearly, the conservatives running the federal government today (and their business and media allies) find stories like Horowitz’s quite compelling.

But are they true? Despite the methodological problems with many recent surveys of professors’ politics, it is true that on most faculties and in many academic disciplines there are more card-carrying Democrats than Republicans, more self-identified liberals than conservatives, and more Gore or Kerry voters than Bush voters. Potential causes for these numbers besides discrimination abound, however, from culture to individual choice to market forces to disciplinary history. And for pernicious effects to follow from them, professors would have to be regularly acting unprofessionally and students would have to be brainless, spineless, and/or gutless. Yet as William Scheuerman, president of United University Professions, recently pointed out in testimony before the Pennsylvania legislature, no student in the entire SUNY system has submitted a formal complaint over political bias among the faculty.

So the next time you hear stories about conservatives being shut out of American higher education, check some facts. If people, programs, and policies at SUNY Fredonia are so hopelessly leftist, how is it that we graduate so many moderate and conservative students? How is it that the Objectivist himself has gained tenure and won both campus- and system-wide awards at Fredonia? If conservatives are dissatisfied with their numbers and influence in the American academy, they should follow his example and join him. To do that, of course, they’ll have to demonstrate the same commitment to intellectual rigor, fairness toward opposing evidence, and consideration of multiple arguments so evident in his research and teaching—as it is among his colleagues.