"Leftist Ideological Monoculture is Bad for Universities, Rendering Them Intellectually Dull Places Imbued with Careerism Rather Than the Energy of Contending Ideas."

     I want to know what a typical leftist university professor would say if you asked him point blank if he thought students should be exposed to a range of viewpoints in the classroom.  It would probably be a good idea to specify by example what you mean by "range of ideas."  In other words, you don't mean that for every lecture or reading on the equality of all mankind you need to balance it out with a lecture or reading saying that slavery is a wonderful institution.  More like, in a course about imperialism, in addition to covering all of the unspeakable evils unleashed on the developing world by Western white males, you might want to have a chapter or lecture about a good thing or two that resulted, like medicine and infrastructure.  Oh, well. 

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As a Republican, I'm on the Fringe

By Robert Maranto
Sunday, December 9, 2007; B01

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities' role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "God and Man at Yale" -- in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others -- making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I've taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused "a sensation" at his university. "It was as if I had become a child molester," he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because "you don't want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts."

I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently "fit" better than I did. At least that's what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn't believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.)

Now there is more data backing up experiences like mine. Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us. Among the findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.

Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book "Whose Welfare?," the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn't working -- yet many sociology professors even now deny that '70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients. Similarly, despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

In my own area, public administration, it took years for bureaucracy-defending professors to realize that then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (aka Reinventing Government) was not a reactionary attempt to destroy government agencies, but rather a centrist attempt to revitalize them. Most of the critics of the academy are conservatives or libertarians, but even the left-of-center E.D. Hirsch argues in "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" that academics in schools of education have harmed young people by promoting progressive dogma rather than examining what works in real classrooms.

All this is bad for society because academics' ideological blinders make it more difficult to solve domestic problems and to understand foreign challenges. Moreover, a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas, a point made by academic critics across the ideological spectrum from Russell Jacoby on the left to Josiah Bunting III on the right.

It's odd that my university was one of only a handful in Pennsylvania to have held a debate on the Iraq War in 2003. That happened because left-leaning Villanova professors realized that to be fair they needed to expose students to views different from their own, so they invited three relatively conservative faculty members to take part in a discussion of the decision to invade. Though I was then a junior faculty member arguing the unpopular (pro-war) side, I knew that my senior colleagues would not hold it against me.

Yet a conservative friend at another university had an equal and opposite experience. When he told his department chair that he and a liberal colleague planned to publicly debate the decision to invade Iraq, his chair talked him out of it, saying that it could complicate his tenure decision two years down the road. On the one hand, the department chair was doing his job, protecting a junior faculty member from unfair treatment; on the other hand, he shouldn't have had to.

Unfortunately, critics are too often tone deaf about the solutions to academia's problems. Conservative activist David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, a group he supports, advocate an Academic Bill of Rights guaranteeing equality for ideological minorities (typically conservatives) and ensuring that faculty are hired and promoted and students graded solely on the basis of their competence and knowledge, not their ideology or religion. That sounds great in theory, but it could have the unintended consequence of encouraging any student who gets a C to plead ideological bias.

Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life.

Robert Maranto is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and co-editor of "Reforming the Politically Correct University," to be published in 2008.

Comments

[terry Brown]

And besides- what kind of republican works for the Brookings institution AND the Clinton Administration...?

[terry Brown]

In response to Chris' post above, I would argue:
His example of how 'political beliefs don't necessarily tie into scholarly beliefs' is anecdotal in the face of statistical arguments by Maranto. And his example states that in his dept. there are 3 democrats- no republicans- and yet their scholarly beliefs cover the ideological spectrum. So does Chris posit that in a larger context including say 30 professors across other departments or universities, that all scholarly beliefs would just as likely be evenly represented if all were democrats than if there were a balanced number of republicans and democrats?
That's a pretty tough sell in the face of, well, logic.

In addition, his assertion that 'Maranto's article proceeds from the false premise that one's political beliefs and affiliations somehow impact their scholarly work and teaching to the detriment of competing political beliefs'
is not backed up by anything other than this weak anecdote including his conjecture on the behavior of 3 people- including himself- in his dept.
Although he does step outside this overwhelming pool of evidence to speak for 'the vast majority of scholars,' with an extremely reassuring explanation of their feelings: (they) "feel duty-bound to educate their students in the ideas that are relevant to the subject under study."

So I guess we're supposed to take his word for it- despite the overwhelming evodence to the contrary...?
Not exactly convincing.

[Chris]

As a typical "leftist" professor, let me try to answer your question. First, a course on classical imperialism would primarily be found in the history department and would focus on European imperialism from roughly the end of the Napoleonic wars until WWI. Not being a historian, I'm not sure what would be taught.

I had a colleague who taught an Imperialism in Literature course in the English department. Her reading list for the quarter featured a number of Third World authors, but also included a number of selections from Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

I'm a sociologist, and from my perch in the social sciences we don't much offer courses on "imperialism," (with a few exceptions) although it's a topic that does find its way into many substantive areas. I have taught courses on Global Development, which certainly features a heavy literature about imperialism within the field. In that course (and I have no reason to believe that the manner in which I taught is that different from the vast majority of my colleagues), we covered neoliberal/free-market theories of development, Marxian (that is, class-based analysis that may or may not be connected with Marxism's political project) theories, and post-colonial theories of development, as these are the three dominant schools of thought in the field. I do offer my scholarly opinion on which theories I find best fit the data, but students are under no obligation to agree with me, and I am, in fact, delighted when they offer well-argued disagreements, as it shows that they not only understand their own beliefs, but they've been able to understand different points of view and critically engage them. Again, I don't believe myself to be atypical in this regard.

Maranto's article proceeds from the false premise that one's political beliefs and affiliations somehow impact their scholarly work and teaching to the detriment of competing political beliefs. While it is true that one's political beliefs will have some impact on what sort of scholarly research in which one egages, the vast majority of scholars are professionals who feel duty-bound to educate their students in the ideas that are relevant to the subject under study. Moreover, political beliefs don't necessarily tie in to scholarly beliefs. As an example, there are three of us in my department who specialize in development issues, two who are fairly liberal Democrats, and the other who I'd characterize as a left-leaning centrist. One of the Democrats is firmly in the camp of free-market development theories; the left-leaning centrist works primarily within the post-colonial camp (what I would regard as the most radical of the traditions), and the third straddles the Marxian/post-colonial fuzzy border. There are very spirited but collegial engagements between the three of us. All of us strive to fairly present the positions and criticisms of the major currents of thought in our field, and all three of us make no apologies for offering our learned opinion to the class on what we believe is the strongest position - our students do, of course, pay to learn from experts in a given field.

I hope this provides you with some sort of answer to your question.