The Atlantic article below, by staff writer Rose Horowitch, points out a fact the whole world knows: academia in America comprises nearly exclusively faculty of a liberal persuasion. Conservative professors are as rare as hen’s teeth. This has led to a dearth of political argumentation pitting Left versus Right, since the Right is hard to be found. It’s also led, as Horowitch says, to a decline in respect for academia. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Click the headline below to read, or find the article archived here. First, the data: Between 30 and 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, but conservatives make up only one of every 10 professors in academia, and even fewer in the humanities and most social-science departments. (At least they did in 2014, when the most recent comprehensive study was done. The number today is probably even lower.) Of the money donated by Yale faculty to political candidates in 2023, for example, 98 percent went to Democrats. This is a relatively new degree of such imbalance: Academia has leaned left for as long as anyone can remember. But for most of the 20th century, conservative faculty were a robust presence throughout the humanities and social sciences. (In 1969, for example, even as anti-war protests raged across campuses, a quarter of the professoriate identified as at least “moderately” conservative.) But their ranks have thinned since the 1990s. At the same time, moderate and independent professors have been replaced by people who explicitly identify as liberal or progressive. Here’s the claimed inimical effect of this imbalance on the reputation of colleges and universities: Conservative underrepresentation has also hurt higher education’s standing with the country at large. Polls show that Americans, particularly on the right, are losing trust in universities. A Gallup survey taken last year, for example, found that Republican confidence in higher education had dropped from 56 to 20 percent over the course of a decade. Respondents attributed this in part to perceived liberal bias in the academy. Why the dearth of conservatives? Horowitch adduces data that some of it may be due to a lack of good candidates, but there also seems to be a bias against hiring conservatives: Opinions differ on the precise extent to which conservatives are being excluded from academia versus self-selecting into nonacademic careers. But they clearly face barriers that liberal and leftist scholars don’t. Professors decide who joins their ranks and what research gets published in flagship journals. And several studies show that academics are willing to discriminate against applicants with different political views. One 2021 survey found that more than 40 percent of American (and Canadian) academics said they would not hire a Donald Trump supporter. Then there’s the fact that entire disciplines have publicly committed themselves to progressive values. “It is a standard of responsible professional conduct for anthropologists to continue their research, scholarship, and practice in service of dismantling institutions of colonization and helping to redress histories of oppression and exploitation,” the American Anthropological Association declared in 2020. “Professors will tell you straight up that people who hold the wrong views don’t belong in universities,” Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University who studies progressive social-justice discourse, told me. “That’s the difference between viewpoint discrimination and other forms of discrimination.” If this is the case, then the dearth of conservatives is not due solely to a lack of meritorious conservative candidates, but is in part due to bias. And that has caused several universities, including ours, to try to bring in conservative speakers,= and to develop new programs that allow right-wing voices to be heard: Some university leaders worry that this degree of ideological homogeneity is harmful both academically (students and faculty would benefit from being exposed to a wider range of ideas) and in terms of higher education’s long-term prospects (being hated by half the country is not sustainable). Accordingly, Johns Hopkins recently unveiled a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right think tank, designed to inject some ideological diversity into the university. Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a widely discussed article last year for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?,” is one of the faculty members involved with the partnership. The institutions will collaborate on a number of efforts to integrate conservative and heterodox thinkers. So we have an odd situation in which both sides are behaving counter to their reputations. Conservatives, who have generally opposed affirmative action, now favor it—for professors with conservative viewpoints. In contrast, the progressive Left, which is often opposed to turning academia into a meritocracy, now wants a meritocracy because conservatives are often seen as lacking academic merit. But there are other issues to consider. The First Amendment, for example, bans the government from restricting speech based on its content. This would seem to prevent universities—at least state universities—from restricting the hiring professors of merit just because they espouse conservative views. (Note the admissions of anti-conservative bias above.) Further, universities are generally forbidden to hire professors based on race, creed, degree of disability, and so on. The University of Chicago’s 1973 Shils report, for example, notes this (my emphasis): There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment, promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff. And there’s an elaboration of this at the report’s end, which includes this: In discussions and decisions regarding appointments, promotions, and reappointments, appointive bodies should concentrate their consideration of any candidate on his qualifications as a research worker, teacher, and member of the academic community. The candidate’s past or current conduct should be considered only insofar as it conveys information relative to the assessment of his excellence as an investigator, the quality of the publications which he lays before the academic community, the fruitfulness of his teaching and the steadfastness of his adherence to the highest standards of intellectual performance, professional probity, and the humanity and mutual tolerance which must prevail among scholars. This would seem to ban even considering political beliefs and stances as a criterion for hiring (or promotion). In Chicago, at least, we cannot redress the imbalance between Right and Left among faculty by preferentially hiring on the Right. That also amounts to discrimination of hiring Left-wing faculty, itself a violation of Shils. Nevertheless, a faculty almost entirely comprising liberals is a faculty not conducive to meeting an important mission of the university: promoting fruitful discussion between those having opposing views on issues. It’s not like all conservatives are lunatics: there are many, some of them here, who are eloquent and make arguments worthy of consideration. Further, even if you are on the Left, you should agree with John Stuart Mill’s claim that you cannot defend your own viewpoint very well if you don’t know the best arguments of the other side. But if that side is missing, what do we do? I have no solution here, at least not one that doesn’t violate the Shils report. One solution is what the newly-established Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression (a free-speech discussion site) is doing: bringing in speakers of divergent views and creating new fora, all designed to promote discussions and debates. But is that an adequate substitute for having faculty members on different sides of an issue? Conservatism, after all, is not like creationism. Creationism is a debunked set of scientific claims and need not be debated on campus (though I wouldn’t oppose such debates). In contrast, conservatism is a widely represented set of political views, many of which can be rationally defended. So, my question to readers (actually two questions): Do we need more conservative faculty members in American colleges and universities? If so, how do you propose to do it without violating the law or academic freedom?
