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 At the same time, moderate and independent professors have been replaced by people who explicitly identify as liberal or progressive.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?
Good questions :
“Do we need more conservative faculty members in American colleges and universities?”
Respectfully – this sounds like a case of “the wrong question”. I know (sort of) why it is asked, though.
“If so, how do you propose to do it without violating the law or academic freedom?”
I think this is what makes me think it is a case of “the wrong question”.
You know me – I sense gnosticism – here, assuming a correct premise/model for how the world should appear.
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;
Washington D.C.
Bryan,
I agree that the wrong question is asked because (1) it ignores “reactionary.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union the word “reactionary” went out of use. American reactionaries appropriated “conservative” to make their views seem more popular than they were. The views of the Koch brothers (Charles and David) align almost precisely with those of their father, Fred C. Koch, a founder of the reactionary John Birch Society. Given America’s leftward drift since the 1960s, “arch-reactionary” is the appropriate label for the Koch brothers. And yet people call them “conservative.” News outlets do Americans no favor by calling reactionaries “conservatives.”
(2) As Jerry has often pointed out, progressive “liberals” are quite illiberal. Indeed, their views diss science and the enlightenment while promoting religious “ways of knowing” as scientific. The progressive claim that free speech is “freeze peach,” and their refusal to listen and respond to views they oppose is a form of conservatism, a dogged inflexibility.
Given the above, the old “conservative” and “liberal” labels don’t seem to apply. Perhaps a cogent question is, “Do we need more flexible faculty members in American colleges and universities?”
Suggested reading: “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer.
This is very interesting – “reaction” was one of the thoughts on my mind!
Universities should be meritocracies, so should definitely not lower standards to hire conservatives (so there should be no “affirmative action” for them).
But that’s not really the issue, the problem has been the exclusion of non-left voices even when they qualify on merit (just some examples being Colin Wright, Bo Wineguard, Noah Carl, or the attempts to force out Carole Hooven, Amy Wax, Roland Fryer, Kathleen Stock, or indeed Larry Summers).
Then there are the taboos on whole areas of research (how many younger versions of Charles Murray or Thomas Sowell are there in academia? — they just wouldn’t get hired).
So, we need to argue for meritocracy but without the taboos and without the automatic disqualification of non-left viewpoints.
I agree with what you’ve written here, but the problem is much worse than erosion of meritocracy.
The current draft version of my university’s academic plan for 2025-2030 has just six broad focus areas. One of them is “Indigenization & Decolonization”. The university will commit to
“Advance the indigenization and decolonization of courses and programs, fostering teaching and learning environments that honour and amplify diverse Indigenous knowledge systems and world views [and] indigenize and decolonize research tools, methods and networks.”
In the academic plan, “indigenization” is defined this way:
“Led by and for Indigenous peoples, the enactment of Indigeneity in academic spaces involves meaningful inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing and being that holds Indigenous cultural integrity intact.”
And “decolonization” is defined as:
“A process that focuses on upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous lands and the rights of Indigenous people to that land, and disrupting the settler relationship with power, land, and sovereignty.”
This will become the DNA of my university. Given that plan, it would be irresponsible for a search committee to not ask a job candidate whether she supports decolonization and indigenization of the university. And if she says “no” then obviously she’s a bad fit to the job and the institution. This isn’t viewpoint discrimination, it’s just due diligence. /s
Great jumping Jesus, did I read this right?
Apart from other problems with that statement, are they saying that part of the University’s mission to take civil and legal rights away from non-indigenous (i.e. white) people? If I’ve read that right, I’m appalled. A left-wing madrassa is a proper term for a school that takes this nonsense to heart. But I’m guessing that language is virtue signaling, not really intended to be applied.
Sorry I tend to write long comments, so I sometimes truncate. Here’s the full definition of those two terms in the draft academic plan:
“INDIGENIZATION
Led by and for Indigenous peoples, the enactment of Indigeneity in academic spaces involves meaningful inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing and being that holds Indigenous cultural integrity intact.
DECOLONIZATION
A process that focuses on upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous lands and the rights of Indigenous people to that land, and disrupting the settler relationship with power, land, and sovereignty by not defining that relationship solely through the Western perspective.”
Yes it all sounds like virtue signalling, perhaps not to be applied. And it’s internally self-contradictory: If something has integrity, why does it need to be held intact? What is an enactment of indigeneity? What are indigenous ways of knowing and being? If indigenization must be led by and for indigenous peoples, then how can the other 96% of faculty & staff participate in indigenization?
But yes you understand that correctly. The university will support indigenous over non-indigenous people (but don’t misunderstand – in my city about 2/3 of the population of ~250,000 people are not what would be called “white people”). I do think university leaders will act on this. They are committed to the Scarborough Charter and will hire dozens of black and indigenous faculty members in explicitly race-based job searches. There’s no reason to think that in other job searches the candidates will not be asked about support for indigenization and decolonization. It’s in the academic plan after all.
Invocation of “power” means this is Marxist-critical dialectics.
… perhaps not to be applied.
That’s wildly optimistic. Once these things are written down they become unchallengeable truths and policies which only an indigenous person (or someone claiming to speak for the indigenous) can interpret, and anyone who does challenge them must be a racist who needs to listen to indigenous voices.
“Decolonization is not a metaphor.”
You may have heard that catchy little saying emanating from faculty lounges after the Hamas pogrom against Israel of Oct 7, 2023. But it’s actually the title of a monograph published in 2012 by two academic scholars named Tuck and Yang. (Tuck is Canadian who was then appointed at the Ontario Institute for Studies (!) in Education, a constituent of the University of Toronto. Their thesis is that the decolonization of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand does require the ethnic cleansing or at least the dispossession and serfdom of all settler people. (Few people in Canada’s indigenous elite are full-blooded Indian. Almost all are children of mixed marriages — that’s how they rose and succeeded. Some are Pretendian. So they will have some racial-purity questions to sort out on Day 1.)
When the indigenous cadres become sovereign, (i.e., when they have deposed the elected government of Canada and installed their own revolutionary council) they will repudiate the process retroactively by which private landowners in Canada hold their property deeds from the original Crown grants. Being the new government, they can indeed repudiate the civil liberties, voting rights, and property ownership of anyone they choose. They have already done this on a small scale at land seizures which they call “1492LandBack.” The Government is simply afraid to do anything about this except pay Dane-geld, partly because there are factions within government who want to see more of it.
When Mike H’s university defines decolonization, its brain trust can’t not have read Tuck and Yang.
Hello Mike. Can we assume that SFU is planning to tear down all its current academic buildings and replace them with Indigeneity, i.e., cedar longhouses of traditional Squamish design? There is also plenty of space in the present academic quadrangle for frames on which to dry fish.
https://www.sfu.ca/aboriginalpeoples/first-peoples–gathering-house.html
A thin layer of cedar on the outer walls, but lots of steel I-beams and concrete where it matters. The administrator who put the project in motion originally called it a “sacred learning space” but the religious theme was scrubbed from their later press releases. Still looks like a church to me. Right beside the Physics Department’s observatory 🙁
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2020AEST0030-001099
First Nations/Native American cultures did not practice democracy or feminism. They were decidedly patriarchal and autocratic for the most part, no? Some I think had tribal councils, but that’s still an oligarchy. And they could be decidedly brutal to their enemies.
Is this the sort of social structure that the decolonizers really want to return to? I think not.
Actually I think they do. Indigenous people (variously defined) make up about 3-5% of Canadians and 0.9% of Americans. You can’t decolonize a society like that without a powerful indigenous oligarchy running the show, immune to being removed from office by millions and millions of dispossessed non-indigenous erstwhile voters. There would be positions of power, influence, and the all-important task of intimidation (all grounded on traditional pre-Contact frameworks) available to every indigenous person who wanted them, just from the scale of the effort.
The apartheid South African white oligarchy had a European tradition of democracy. They just limited it to white people. As you say, North American indigenous people had no tradition of democracy or the quaint notion of feminism and would have no need of instituting these colonialist structures among themselves lest the wrong cronies got into the ruling elite of the oligarchy. Even today, the traditional elders insist the real decisions, such as about land stewardship and cooperation with settler resource projects, rest with them, not with local chiefs and band councils elected under the racist Federal Indian Act. The elders, with the blessing of the Government of Canada when push comes to shove, regard them as the equivalent of a village reeve and township council, and would surely liquidate them as Uncle Toms on Day 1 of the new order.
Of course the academic studies activists who are not deemed Indian enough to avoid defenestration will be in a very bad position. They are playing with fire, but I guess it’s a pretty good career as long as people rubbing sticks together is all there is.
” “Indigenization & Decolonization” ”
Look up Korenizatsiya – Stalin’s and Lenin’s praxis of indigenization in the Soviet Union.
Also (bold added):
“That’s why I [edit: Paulo Freire] admire Cape Verde’s president, Artistides Pereira. He gave a speech in Praia in which he made an extraordinary statement that has a lot to do with our conversation now: “We made our liberation and we drove out the colonizers. Now we need to decolonize our minds.” That’s it exactly. We need to decolonize the mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new context evolving from the struggle for freedom.”
-Paulo Freire
The Politics of Education
p. 187
… there’s a word for what Freire is proposing – rhymes with trainwashing.
Traincrashing? Drainflushing? Painlashing?
All of the above?
Some might say that hiring conservatives would lead to higher standards!
I don’t know about that. Some might also say “Reality has liberal bias” 🙂
Reality might have a classical liberal bias. It most assuredly does not have a regressive left bias.
Correct. The fringe left is now barely sane.
Yes..just saying…
That was true in the 80s and early 90s. Not today, sadly.
I agree, but the two parties in the US are today not equally delusional, nor are their delusions equally well-meaning. The delusions of the current Republican party are at least equally as crazy, and less well-intentioned and more consequential than the Democrats’ delusions. “Jan 6 [a violent democracy-threatening insurrection] was a day of love”….”Ukraine was the aggressor”…”drill baby drill!”…the insane justifications for tariffs….crazy beliefs about vaccination, about history, environmental protection, about ovules and fetuses, about climate change, etc). These are foundational, existential delusions/lies, publicly supported by 99% of current national conservative office-holders . I know their base is more sane than their leaders (as is the case with Democrats), but apparently not by much. Both sides are not equal. I know that if one’s highest priority is, say, the threat of trans-gendered people out-competing biological women in sports, then the “libs” might appear worse. But I question such people’s priorities, when the future of our democracy and the future of the world is at stake because of the delusions of the majority of current conservatives. Many more women will suffer because of the common conservative delusions than because of liberals’ delusions.
I don’t think that anyone thinks that men claiming to be women in sports is the most important thing. Being thrown into jail and having your child taken from you because you don’t agree with some activist’s plan to secretly transition the child, including surgery and hormones, is more important. And the fact that people who stood up to that nonsense are physically attacked, cancelled, and so forth is not a good thing and if it continues will lead to full-scale fascism. Everyone knows Donald is a loon and that this will be his last term (and he might not even make it through that). There is little evidence that the Democrats see the error of their ways, and some are even doubling down, saying that the election was lost because they weren’t woke enough. As to things threatening all of humanity, there are enough crazies in the world that the USA having a sensible government would improve things only slightly.
CU Boulder tried it and got John Eastman 🙂
I don’t think that universities should go out of their way to hire conservatives or liberals or persons of any political persuasion. They should hire based on the ability to teach, do research, and participate in university service. Let the political chips fall where they may.
The problem with this position lies in the fact that some disciplines are inherently political or believe that their mission is a political one—the American Anthropological Association, for example. I have no idea what to do about cases like that. Imagine what would happen if all professional societies decided to embed politics into their respective missions. Universities would become lobbies.
Thank goodness that the sciences are still tethered to empirical reality, limiting their ability to lean left or right. Disciplines not tied to empirical reality would seem to be most susceptible to political fashion. Are they really disciplines at all?
🎯
Unfortunately, I would argue that the sciences has become untethered from reality and upon examination have very similar problems with bias as the humanities. One reason is that many institutions have Deans, Provosts or Presidents whose intellectual home is in the humanities and social sciences. I have witnessed on multiple occasions where the administration has cancelled a search because they couldn’t find a candidate not from the “oppressor” class. This ideologically driven hiring has caused biology to teach that there are more than two sexes, geologist to claim that air and water quality in the US is the worst it has ever been and further advocate that solar and wind is the only possible way to reduce CO2 emissions.
I do believe that having people question evolution or quantum theory on the faculty can be advantageous if those individuals are held to the same standard of evidence as everyone else.
My answer to your first question is a resounding “YES”, if for no other reason than to Make Universities Great Again. For MUGA to happen, the academy must be a place where ideas are formulated and challenged, not pronounced by fiat and echoed about. It is my impression (I could very well be wrong) that a significant majority of professors would welcome more conservative views into their schools precisely because they agree that Universities should be places where ideas collide. I feel that only a few academic departments would be intolerant of MUGA. Mills was dead right.
Question 2 is where I haven’t got a clue, let alone an answer and hope to see some good ideas here.
Isn’t it important to define what “ideas” are absent from academia given the hypothesized discrimination against Conservatives? Which of their beliefs are less represented than they should be? That being a human begins at conception? That same-sex relations are morally wrong? That America is a Christian country? I’m being provocative of course focusing on social aspects, but the label “Conservative” entails a wide range of qualities and it would be helpful to know which of those are wrongly absent from the academia, with emphasis on the wrongly. And it’s not just the social aspects. Does biology need more people who believe humans are products of “God” or geology need more people who believe the world is 6,000 years old?
Excellent point. It is clearly unreasonable to presume that there should necessarily be a 50-50 mix of liberal and conservative view points, any more than we should presume that there should be a proportionate balance of persons with other competing ideologies (e.g., communists versus capitalists). If the goal is human flourishing, there can be valid justifications for preferring one ideology over another. I guess the hard question is what justifications are “valid.”
Some missing ideas:
Biology is real, and there are two sexes.
Capitalism is very good overall, being the best way of reducing world poverty.
Colonialism benefited colonised countries as much as harming them.
Different outcomes between men and women (e.g. pay gap) are mostly the result of real, biological differences between men and women (not the result of discrimination by the “patriarchy”).
“Systemic racism” ended in the 1980s, and is not the cause of group differences in people born since.
Reality is real, not constructed out of words.
IQ is real and important, being the biggest single factor in things like career success.
All human traits (including IQ) are heavily affected by genes.
Free speech benefits everyone, including the “oppressed”.
“Race” has an underlying biological reality (with a layer of social construction on top).
Too much governmental intervention (and too much wealth redistribution) is likely to be worse for everyone.
Human bias means that “lived experience” is hugely unreliable.
Stereotypes mostly have some degree of accuracy.
Many lauded ideas (stereotype threat, microaggressions, unconscious bias, etc) have no evidence base behind them.
Living with two parents (of different sex) is actually quite important for children’s outcomes.
Reducing people’s responsibility for their own lives and outcomes is usually bad for those people.
People “of colour” have done just as much bad stuff over history as white people.
I agree Coel, but would argue that these are not ideological beliefs but rather positions that are (or can or should be) based on reason and science. The ideology here is an extremely left one that suppresses even consideration of such hypotheses (for want of a better term). There is a difference, for example, between saying that same-sex relationships are morally wrong given a religious worldview and that same-sex parenting may result in less positive outcomes for children than different sex parenting. The latter is amenable to empirical test, albeit a challenge to settle, and may ultimately depend on context. For example, the negative effect may be found in countries hostile to same-sex relations but not in countries with more liberal attitudes. The critical thing about your list to me as a psychologist is that the items are (or should be) free from ideology, wherever that ideology might originate. What does the preponderance of evidence show and what further evidence is needed to determine validity and generality.
I actually started to edit my first message above to address ideology of the left, as nicely illustrated by your list, but somehow messed up which led to the partial duplication and incomplete subsequent post. Also means, this will be the last from me on this so as to not violate the rules.
Well, one would think “academic merit” would handle the issue of creationists, flat-earthers, and a whole slew of religious nonsense. A creationist biologist does not merit a professorship in biology. I think the point of academic merit is to keep those who do not meet the minimum qualities of the profession out, not the biologist who voted for Trump.
btw, I know that’s three for me…. I’m aware of da roolz.
I think the issue is not the lack of conservatives, but the overwhelming presence of neo-Marxists, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences. A student should be able to go into one of those disciplines and have viewpoint options that are more varied than “the West is bad” and “the West is very bad.” The prevalence of scholars and scholarship driven by anti-Capitalist and anti-Colonialist ideology has undoubtedly driven a great many would-be scholars away from academia. How do we achieve more balance? It has to start with schools not discriminating against non-Marxian scholars. How has the University of Texas Austin done it?
I think the magic spell / epistemic illusion has to be broken.
Marxism, or describing problems in the world per se is not … ahem… the problem.
The magic spell of political activism is that it appears to reveal secret hidden knowledge with the power to solve all the problems, on the basis of an obsession about the problems – and “you” don’t – so “you” are part of the problem.
There is no such thing behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain.
Do you really mean the “University of Texas Austin”? I suspect you mean “University of Austin”. Big difference between the University of Austin and the “University of Texas at Austin”.
Isn’t it important to define what “ideas” are absent from academia given the hypothesized discrimination against Conservatives? Which of their beliefs are less represented than they should be? That being a human begins at conception? That same-sex relations are morally wrong? That America is a Christian country? I’m being provocative of course focusing on social aspects, but the label “Conservative” entails a wide range of qualities and it would be helpful to know which of those are wrongly absent from the academia, with emphasis on the wrongly. And it’s not just the social aspects. Does biology need more people who believe humans are products of “God” or geology need more people who believe the world is 6,000 years old?
As well, comparisons of academics to the general population is as wrong here as in misguided DEI efforts. PhDs would appear better, even more than simple “Post-Graduate” which would include the innumerable MBAs out there. How many Evangelicals (strong supporters of Republicans) are there with PhDs in biology? Some circularity in likely causal interpretations of different people.
At a high level it’s alternative to the Marxist and neo-Marxist ideology that says that human relations are a matter of oppressor/oppressed, and that this dichotomy is either a matter of class or race (depending, I guess, on your generation). Part of that is the rejection of the West as the exemplar of bourgeois ideology and the belief that freedom can only come with the destruction of the Capitalism and the West (which are used synonymously). This isn’t necessarily conservative; there have been many anti-Marxist liberals. Of course, to many, that alone would qualify a person as extreme right-wing.
In 1995 I signed up for a co-ed basketball league at my college. It had special rules stipulating that the men could not grab any rebounds, or block shots taken by a female in the painted area. Obviously, they had run into major issues with men’s huge physical advantages over women.
But it wasn’t enough to handicap the men. No, the rule was prefaced with… “due to the historical cultural advantages that men have experienced in sports over women…” (I’m paraphrasing here from memory).
In other words, they were ascribing a blank slate explanation to the reason for the disparity between the men and the women. Even as a 19 year old, this stood out to me. Why do we need an explanation for the rule…was there an assumption that men and women are the same, and now this rule handicapping the men needs to be reconciled with that worldview?
And why is the explanation 100% environmental, instead of a combination of natural male advantages + more exposure to sports? Can we not admit that men and women have physiological differences that are not due to oppression of women?
Again, this was in the mid-90s. At a large public university south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Progressive/woke…whatever you want to call it, has been part and parcel of college life in the US for decades.
As Hitchens would have said, long have the termites dined.
For a hint of the ideas that are poorly represented in academia, read (or listen to
presentations by) Thomas Sowell and Niall Ferguson in regard to history/economics;
Bruce Gilley in regard to colonial history; Colin Wright and Carole Hooven in regard to Biology; and some of the commenters on this site.
Further, the idea of subjecting “scholarly” journals to experimental tests was put forth by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose several years ago, and not exactly welcomed by Boghossian’s academic institution. The idea of experimental test, which is neither conservative nor progressive, would seem fundamental to even the
simplest operations, even in academia.
Prestigious colleges and universities should, instead, have a list of Trumpist politicians, media stars, pundits, etc. and then refuse all of their children enrollment. You cut off our grants? Fine, we cut off your family’s access to prestigious degrees. Both sides can hit each others’ wallets. You’ll see the votes dry up right quick.
Jon, are you suggesting higher ed should discriminate against the children of Republicans to get even with Trump for withholding from some institutions Biden Administration approved funding for some research grants and DEI efforts? Are you sure that the American public will flock to the support of a higher ed system that behaves that way?
Yes. I am suggesting exactly that. These people are all Ivy Leaguers. Teach them how biting the hand that fed them will mean that their children will not be privy to the same access, clubs, mentors, connections, DIPLOMAS that they had. Teach them that the legacy admission they hoped their family would have access to has evaporated. Give the seat to someone whose parents aren’t gutting academia. And by the way, the same goes for the children of foreign dictators and despots. Do not reward the behavior. Do I think the American public would approve? I don’t know. Most Americans don’t attend prestige schools so I bet they wouldn’t care.
Jon, your anger is righteous and your fear for higher ed palpable and understandable. But entitled, racist, and bigoted tribal behavior has landed the academy in a place that provoked this reaction and your suggested response might well prolong the lesson. The Trump Show will end in four years. Higher ed will survive this kerfuffle and has a chance to excise the Marxist cancer that provoked it. Bend to the wind then straighten and stand tall when it passes. Women and other people disadvantaged in their societies have used this strategy effectively to survive and thrive for many millennia. It works.
Punishment must be swift, not wind-bending over 1000 years. And believe me, I’m all in favor of ending the hyper leftism that has wormed it’s way into our university ecosystem. It’s a toxic cancer. However, the maximalist, short sighted, dangerous response by the right wing is absolutely unacceptable. It doesn’t just go against my values, it goes against the national interest. In response the schools should immediately and without favor engage in a complete and TOTAL purge of the Trumpite’s children. Start clean. Erase a generation of their resume building. This is not that I think we need to eliminate conservatives on campuses. There should be more conservatives (or at least rational centrists, which I consider myself). But the Trumpites? No. But all is not lost for them. Maybe the prez can open his online school again.
Sorry, but I disagree. In principle it sounds good, but you’re punishing kids who may not even BE Trumpites (that would be about half of American kids). Sorry, we don’t do stuff lke this to “erase a generation,” we do it at the ballot box.
I find this solution cruel and mean spirited, punishing those who haven’t even voted.
I don’t know if we need more conservatives in academia. I don’t think that is the root of the problem. This issue raised in the provocative title of Rose Horowitz piece is whether to use the same tactics as DEI to address a perceived problem of under representation. To attempt to tip the balance would be as disastrous and unfair as DEI. It would fail to address the underlying forces that generated the imbalance.
Just yesterday a “skeptic” friend on Facebook posted a meme that suggested that academia is liberal because it based on evidence and reason. Skeptics need to question their beliefs when it conveniently supports their moral beliefs. It is sad that so many lack that insight. They may want all of academia to adhere to methods that correct for bias, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. There is no equivalent of the scientific method in the humanities.
I think academia has swung to the far left because academics haven’t learned from cognitive and evolutionary psychology. In deed many in the humanities attack cognitive and evolutionary psychology because it threatens their beliefs.
We are a tribal species, our minds evolved to categorize people and perceive the categories as coherent groups with collective agency in competition (tribes). This is a fundamental and pervasive bias. Yet rather than recognizing the bias and systematically try to avoid it, the humanities have made that bias the very foundation of all their theories/perspectives. Thus everything is viewed through the lens of “identities” and patterns of oppression, without questioning that point of view.
This bias is further amplified by the fact that it is highly moral, with a clear good guy (the oppressed) and bad guy (the oppressors). When we humans accept a moral narrative we fall into motivated reasoning, because moral beliefs should not be questioned. Academia has fallen down this rabbit hole, and the only solution is to get people in the humanities to wake up. You can’t force them to change their beliefs, but we might be able to get them to understand how they became so biased. The only way out of this is to break the strangle hold of power/conflict/identity theory in the humanities.
Sorry, I misspelled the name, it’s Horowitch.
One sentence summarizes the problem: “There is no equivalent of the scientific method in the humanities.” Or, in other words, the superstition prevalent in that part of academia— that what they do is not in the same universe as the cellphones they do it on, or the dentistry they depend upon when they have a toothache.
Intellectually talented conservatives seemed to have long ago abandoned academia. And yes, intellectually talented conservative is not an oxymoron. Where did they go? A lot of them seemed to have gone into business. I’m now in my third decade of a business career, and I’d estimate the ratio of conservative to liberal in the senior level positions to be the reverse of what we see in academia…close to 90/10 conservative. The vast majority of the people I’ve worked with above a certain level at a minimum lean Republican. I know there are some prominent “progressive” business leaders, but they seem to be very much in the minority. I also question how many of these are merely playing lip service to progressive values, but don’t actually believe in them.
So this is the flip side of the academic freeze out of conservatives. Entire sectors of the economy become dominated by conservatives or non-progressives.
I’ve been on university search committees for deans, faculty members, and staff members, and anything connected to politics is strictly forbidden. The interesting question is in what fields are conservatives poorly represented?
Most of the biologists I know on my campus and at other universities are moderate to liberal. Perhaps that is because one must follow the data and be a flexible thinker and change when new knowledge is acquired. Maybe they are more connected to the natural world. Some agricultural economists I know are very conservative. Maybe there is not enough money in public education to attract conservatives. I do notice politicians like J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz trash universities even though they attended elite universities.
Define ‘conservative’.
In the view that everyone who rejects gender flux or the idea that capitalism needs to be overcome is a conservative, sure.
In the view that you’re not a conservative unless you think that vaccines are a plot to summon the devil, that Jews are trying to corrupt our good, Christian society, that the presence of any non-whites anywhere is inherently DEI, that evolution and global warming are conspiracies made up by unelected elites for , that homosexuals are inherently paedophiles and that brown people are in dire need of bombing, uh, not so much.
I understand the frustration with the left wing going off the edge into lala land, but this doesn’t actually change that the conservative spectrum has been in lala land for decades and has only gotten worse since.
And I absolutely, one hundred percent guarantee that if ‘Conservatives’ are called to fill in positions in academia for DEI reasons, it won’t be agreeable neighbourhood conservatives. It’ll be those people. Because they’re the ones that conservatives consider conservative.
And that’s not a prediction. That’s demonstrable reality. Note the Republicans denying conservative Obama suggestions for the supreme court and instead pushing through their special ed conservative candidates.
Maybe universities in the USA and Canada are still in better shape than we are in NZ. But if so, where we are now in NZ might be good to consider. We no longer have intelligent left-leaning scholars who assume even a Marxist theoretical foundation and who try in good faith to build better by building on that foundation. The activist left in NZ academia today is composed almost exclusively of people who have neither studied Marx nor mastered any scholarly discipline. Their ‘specialties’ are in what some call modern ‘Studies Departments’ or ‘grievance studies’, overflow from classical sociology, anthropology, history, and various kinds of speculative metaphysics. They do not have backgrounds in mathematics or physics or chemistry or Latin, where basic disciplinary standards provide some level of gatekeeping and at least the possibility that the educators have something of value to pass on to the students.
When you see who’s in power here, you can see why there is a turn against merit, why the need to enforce an orthodoxy, why the desire to sacralise. Because the activist left lost contact with the raison d’etre of the classical university, they are merely reactive, play acting as academics, immature, and bent on destruction.
What can be done?
1. Begin by substantially reducing the humanities and social sciences. Keep languages and literature, classics — focus on protecting and retaining only those humanities people who have proven disciplinary expertise as evident in their scholarly publications. If you’re involved in the judging the humanities then actually read those publications yourself, whatever your own discipline, and where needed check with disciplinary experts over the age of 70 or who are retired.
2. Recognise that most admin and management roles are targets for ideological capture, and where there is capture, the roles must be eliminated. Begin by eliminating most admin and management roles. Eliminate the office of campus culture, the provost, the deputy-pro-vice deans and other deanlets. Get the government to introduce stiff penalty tax on universities according to the number of staff employed in admin and management roles. (According to a recent study of universities, NZ has a higher proportion of admin/managers than any nation. It degenerates quickly to tail wagging dog, so the balance needs to be restored in favour of scholars.)
3. Require, going forward, that admin and management roles rotate among senior staff, according to a schedule, with individuals selected by lottery.
4. If, as in NZ and Australia, your Colleges of Education are inside universities, then take them out of there.
5. Do everything possible to cut off the access routes to the capture of the academy while there is still anything left worth saving.
IMO, the abandonment of “liberal education”¹ took off with the rapid growth of the perceived need for mass tertiary credentials. This of course led to widening the net for student enrolment. Which led to a bums-on-seats model of university education. Which required processing an overall student population that was less “academically oriented” than previously. To put it crudely, quantity versus (traditional academic) quality. Hence the re-orientation of the institutions to become “customer focussed”, various soft-centred “studies” departments, rampant grade inflation, etc.
The ship has sailed regarding former academic values. And AI™ is just the latest nail in the coffin. As a septuagenerian I miss the good-old-days, but truly I do not see a positive future for what universities have become.
. . . . .
¹ As it used be called in the old days.
Hi Barbara,
I agree. The ‘massification’ of higher education did lead to a change in values and to some real damage to the academy. Time frame of, what, the past 60 years? But I think there’s enough lingering value in most universities that we should try to close off the soft options while adhering firmly to standards in the more serious ones. Students will either learn to step up to what’s required or they’ll leave university. For a while, a theme I’ve been hearing is that X (with an A average and a 1500/1600 SAT) went to university to become a neurosurgeon, but found it too hard and is now majoring in one of the social sciences. There’s a lot in that which needs to be addressed before we throw in the towel.
About 25 years ago, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft observed that the Left was no longer intellectually serious. At that time, the conventional Left’s slide from analyses related to Marxism to wokeism’s victim hierarchies was already evident.
In the groves of academe, the grievance studies departments were rising (in an administrative sense) and the wokerati were capturing other Humanities dep’ts.
It is not clear that the mere expansion of tertiary education explains the latter
developments. Higher ed expansion had been going on throughout the 20th century. My hunch (no more than that) is that the bowdlerized post-modernism in late 20th century academe is what underlay intellectual decay in both the Left and what we used to call the liberal arts, or the arts and humanities.
Isn’t a lot of it that post-war students, enflamed with a sense of social justice, soon started to veer away from the classical humanities and social sciences? Where these subjects got technical or abstract, a group of students found them too removed from ‘real life’ concerns. Also, the women who HAD been at university during the war (and studying rigorous, classical subjects there) were suddenly mostly either back at home building families or busy developing new stand-alone disciplines of feminist studies, women’s studies, etc. Also there were sudden demands for Black studies, American studies. It was an era for building up ‘civil rights’ in all its various guises.
If that’s part of the history, then it is maybe less ‘capture’ and more of what you call a ‘slide’. It seems to me that much of the difference between where we are now and where we were then is that THEN the academics still had the rigorous foundations themselves. But somewhere between the Silent Generation, their Boomer students, their Gen X students, and the Millennials, we stopped passing those foundations on to our students, so that we now have a new generation keen to specialise in grievance and activism for lack of ever having encountered anything else.
I’ll stop now lest I risk offending against the rooolz.
Yes. To avoid making my comment too long I left out the multigenerational aspects, that this generation’s faculty are the previous generation’s students, so the changes¹ are compounded. This makes any sort of rollback that much more unlikely.
. . . . .
¹ Progress, or rot, depending on one’s point of view.
I get confused by the American conflation of “liberal” with “left”. In Australia the Liberal Party is the conservative party of small government and individual rights and freedoms. I am originally from the US but always made a distinction between liberalism and leftism because it seemed to me that those on the left often hated liberalism and liberals. The problem on US campuses is the intolerant left, not true liberals like Bill Maher (who is hated by the left).
Mike, I too resent the Left’s appropriating the label “liberal”. In today’s world, the loose binary is, rather, one of authoritarian versus liberal. The Left and the Right are both in the former category.
As a liberal, I feel that, yes, it would be better to have more conservative voices on campus, but also as a liberal, I don’t think such a development should be engineered from above.
Well, if they don’t hire conservatives and academia continue to be left-wing biased, their funding will be gone for good. No taxpayer want to give their money for an academia who don’t respect its mission. There is no need for a public-funded left-wing thin-tank. Expect more funding cuts until they understand, nature always heal.
Conservatives can always go in the private sector and make money in engineering, pharma companies, and so on. Private research exist and is clearly more accepting. There is no other choice when the public sector don’t do its mission.
We certainly would be well served by having more conservative faculty. Jonathan Haidt has pointed out that, essentially, there are no conservative social psychologists. That definitely limits our discussions of social policy. One assumes that this reflects active discrimination. And yet, there are not all that many conservative biologists, and I can’t imagine a biology department choosing to hire a liberal with a weaker record of scholarship over a conservative.
The questions asked may be “academic” in some future date given the rise and when developers get it “right” AI may be the death knell to universities as we know them now.
AI won’t give a jot left or right, you will get however “every which way of knowing” and more. Just pick where you want to be and flesh it out. I doubt though you will get a serious study of the fetish wants of glaciology other than a mention of insanity.
Each to them own.