It’s well known that most American academics lean towards the Left (I’m one), and that this trend is increasing over time. Here’s a plot of the political leaning of academics made by Sam Abrams (a politics and government prof at Sarah Lawrence) shown on the website of the Heterodox Academy. The trend is clear, and it’s the same among many surveys of American academics.
If I was asked ten years ago to explain this difference and also the trend over time, I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer, though now various places have suggested self-selection: academia by its very nature of free expression and (supposed) favoritism of argument and open ideas, favors liberals over conservatives. Here’s from The Independent Review:
The very nature of political inquiry is implicated here as well. Some argue that because academia focuses on expanding ideas, it is inherently opposed to conservatism, which seeks, in a nod to Buckley, to yell “Stop!” In some respects, a liberal-leaning academia should be expected to some degree. The confounding reality now, though, is that many liberal academics agree it is vital to limit ideas they deem harmful.
This paper in Theory and Society gives multiple explanations, including self-selection:
Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas.
But lately I’ve been hearing another explanation, a self-aggrandizing one offered by liberal thinkers themselves. It was originally stated by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Now what does that mean? I suppose you can interpret it as another way of saying what’s above: universities, whose job is to find out the truth (“reality”) tend to attract liberals. But I don’t think that’s what the phrase is supposed to mean. I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views. That’s what Grok says when asked to explain how the Left uses the phrase:
Often deployed earnestly (or semi-earnestly) to argue that empirical evidence on topics like climate change, inequality, public health data, or social issues tends to support center-left policy conclusions more than conservative ones. The implication: “Stop calling facts ‘liberal bias’—reality just doesn’t align with your priors.”
And that may indeed be true, but it reverses the causes of what’s meant: “the views of liberals are more often supported by the facts than are the views of conservatives or moderates.”
Well, one can argue about even that (e.g., climate change on one hand and Israel on the other), but what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism. But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. Evolutionary biology itself gives just the facts, though those facts can be accepted by liberals or rejected by conservatives like religious creationists. How one deals with the facts depends on one’s upbringing and predisposition.
Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.
This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. Click screenshot to read.
The authors argue first that ideological neutrality is important in finding the truth:
Arguably, a more feasible solution to the new demarcation problem is an old solution: when engaging in the core activities of scientific research, scientists should strive to eliminate the influence of all non-epistemic (e.g., ethical and political) values from the work they are conducting and (importantly) reviewing—at least to the extent that this is humanly possible. Like the ideal of a perfect democracy, the ideal of perfect ethical or political neutrality is probably never attainable in practice. Nonetheless, it is an ideal that motivates scientists to identify and hold each other accountable for any non-epistemic biases that might infiltrate and potentially distort scientific reasoning.
They then say that science is best conducted employing four Mertonian norms (Robert Merton was an American sociologists who wrote a lot about the sociology of science):
Merton’s first norm, perhaps inappropriately called “communism,” “prescribes the open communication of findings to other scientists and correlatively proscribing secrecy” (Zuckerman and Merton 1971).
. . . Merton’s second norm—universalism—states that personal attributes of a scientist, such as race, gender, nationality, religion, class, or political affiliation, are irrelevant when evaluating their scientific work. This norm functions epistemically as a corrective against all possible forms of discrimination other than merit.
. . . Merton’s third value, organized skepticism, encourages scientists to remain open to future falsification. This involves considering “all new evidence, hypotheses, theories, and innovations, even those that challenge or contradict their own work” (Anderson et al. 2010).
. . . Merton’s fourth norm called “disinterestedness” is perhaps the most controversial. Taken literally, this norm seems to require of scientists that they set aside personal goals in the pure pursuit of truth. Even the most careful scientist is vulnerable to confirmation bias (Wiens 1997). The expectation that scientists should behave as if they had no stake in the outcomes of their research is meant to counteract the effects of wishful thinking.
Now the authors discuss the opposition to these norms, and problems that arise when using them, but I think it’s useful to recognize that setting aside ideology is the best and fastest way to understand reality.
I suppose this post is a long-winded way of exporessing what I see as a self-aggrandizing phrase, and one that distorts the way that finding truth really works, but I’ve heard the phrase often enough to dissect it a bit.
The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes.
I think the claim that reality leans liberal is based on a very short view of History.
Agreed. The claim “reality has a left-wing bias” is made by left wingers who are oblivious to their own biases. They are just as keen as the right to reject any science they don’t like (more or less anything related to the effect of genes on human behaviour and abilities, for example; plus swathes of stuff related to “trans” issues).
[Note: I use “left-wing” rather than “liberal” since I dislike the American usage of “liberal” as meaning “left-wing”.]
Me too. Today’s Left is not the least bit liberal. It is thus important to not conflate Left with liberal because to a significant degree these are opposing terms today.
Of course Dr. Coyne is correct – reality just IS and has no “bias” whatsoever.
Perhaps reality is biased towards entropy. But that also just IS. It’s still a bias towards something, and perhaps that’s equalibrium?
Not a simple question/answer imo…
Agree with this take.
That indelible quote above – the hot take of an interviewer – is high-octane, is it not? A mile wide – an inch deep. I’m not sure what to make of it but I’m leaning toward Deepity (Daniel Dennett)… but not exactly… thought-terminating cliché (R. J. Lifton) is another… hmm…
Two other authors that bear on this that come to mind (in haste – readers feel free to search) :
C. P. Snow
Eric Voegelin
Academics tend to lean one way or another in different cultural settings, for a variety of reasons. Niall Ferguson has reminded us of the penetration of German academia in the 1920s by the German National Socialist Workers Party. See:
https://www.hoover.org/research/treason-intellectuals-niall-ferguson .
At my former employer, there was a separate testing group that performed analysis and acceptance testing: In order to prevent confirmation bias. It was a good system. In some cases it was literally: hand your test specimens and test protocol through a small door in the wall to the test group.
Similarly with software. Testing your own code is like proofreading your own writing — there is a strong tendency to focus on what it you know it should be instead of what it is. I had the very good fortune to work at a company where the testing was overseen by a former submarine officer, who (unsurprisingly) took very seriously his job of looking for trouble, with the attitude that anything which had not been demonstrated to be correct could very well be broken, and he would not let such a thing get past him if he could at all help it.
It would seem to me that “disinterestedness” should be the sine qua non of scientific inquiry, but it is essentially never found. Reputations are built in part on commitments to points of view that are debated and defended, while the contrasting ideas are questioned and denigrated. This is especially true in the social sciences. And now it has reached a point where even researching some questions is considered potentially dangerous or immoral.
Open scientific inquiry is fine as long as it fits someone’s closely held definition of openness.
Okay, I challenge you to find out what my interest was in understanding the genetic basis of reproductive isolation in Drosophila.
I’m waiting. . . .
If I knew you well, I might be able to come up with a good response to this. Not knowing you at all, any attempt would be purely speculative. My reference mainly applied to the social sciences. Robert K. Merton a principal figure in the study of the sociologies of science and knowledge.
Coming up with a response is of course making up a story unless the scientist tells you about the motivations. But you’d be hard pressed to find any bias that led me to the study: it was simply reading a paper by J.B.S. Haldane in 1922 and realizing that there was a widespread biological phenomenon that remained unexplained. I wanted to explain it, and that started a cottage industry.
And you didn’t say that your reference applied mainly to the social science, so I guess you’re admitting that pure curiosity could be a major motivation for research in the hard sciences.
Anecdotally: I am a liberal, an academic, a Jew, and an environmentalist, but I see no intrinsic connection among the four. Certainly, the academy has come to increasingly reject liberalism since the Biden administration, and has come to largely embrace regressive leftism. I’m an environmentalist because I follow science, which is fully independent from politics. My being Jewish is my racial/ethnic designation, and I’d be opposed to antisemitism/anti-Zionism even if I were not Jewish, as it a hate ideology that no decent person would ever embrace. My point is, when we establish various categories to impose on people’s beliefs, and we detect what seem like patterns but are really only biases on the part of those asserting the importance of these patterns, we perhaps inevitably lose a nuanced understanding of the complexity of the pressures that shape and change a person’s outlook on life.
Another motivation for scientific inquiry: the strong urge to commit oneself to something you can rely upon. Unlike the religious believers, who rely on wholly invented, imaginary entities, we rely on the reproducibility of natural world observations—from the daily rising and setting of the sun to properly done experiments (or even just standard curves) in the lab. I think this is why we feel so strongly—almost like a religious passion—about honest reporting of research results.
And yet there are some – we’ve all heard of such cases – who are less committed to curiosity and the advancement of knowledge than to their own career success, and who went to unethical lengths such as manipulating or outright faking data to bolster their theories and their careers. Fortunately the way science works means that such charlatans are usually caught out sooner or later.
Preach it, Brother!
It is plausible that the solid reliability of mathematics saved my life. The (CoC) after my name stands for Child of Chaos, and I did have a distressingly chaotic childhood. I found in school mathematics a solid place to stand; where truth was not a matter of opinion or authority or hidden knowledge, where what was true yesterday stayed true regardless of someone’s mood or agenda, where questioning something was not a moral failing, where disputes could be resolved without violence, and where even a child could say “that’s not right” and be taken seriously. There really is no substitute for being taken seriously.
I agree that reality has no obvious political side to it, at least in general, but perhaps the search for reality does, depending on what we see as the opposite of liberal.
If one takes the literal meaning of “conservative” as opposed to change, including when faced with facts, then there are certainly elements in the academy (not all, sadly) that are by their very nature anti-conservative. Some resistance to change until the evidence warrants it is inherent in science but it is not change per se that is opposed. We seek advancement of knowledge … that is, change. The evidence needs to be persuasive and generally provide a theoretical mechanism, which can sometimes lag behind.
Resistance to change serves to maintain aspects of the dominant worldview, which historically has had a theological core, hence the long-standing association between conservatism and religiosity, especially with respect to social conservatism. This connection is increasingly transparent with the growth of religious nationalism and the far right around the world.
So I think antipathy to such a stagnant worldview is “natural” in an institution committed to discerning the objective reality of how the world works as opposed to retaining commitment to a traditional ideology.
The complication today is that a new “religion” (ideology) has become dominant on the far left, and is as resistant as the far right to contradictory evidence with its implied changes. Biological differences between the sexes “can’t” exist, nor should they even be studied. Moreover, a marked distinction between sexes cannot be correct. Called biodenial by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge in their critique of indoctrination in women’s studies.
While it is striking, data like that represented here by the HxA graph sends the wrong message and pretty much invites affirmative action for Republicans. The problem is ideology or dogmatism, wherever it lies on the political spectrum. Unfortunately, academia today is being squeezed from both sides, especially from the left over recent decades in English speaking countries where wokeness thrived and now, at least in the USA, from the backlash of a resurgent religious-infused right, a long standing antagonist of science and change.
“If one takes the literal meaning of “conservative” as opposed to change…” – Jim
It should be noted that conservatism isn’t incompatible with reforms. Not all conservatives are status-quo conservatives or reactionary ones. Edmund Burke (1729-1797)—often called the father of modern conservatism—wrote the following:
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
(Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. [1790.] In: Edmund Burke, Revolutionary Writings, ed. by Iain Hampsher-Monk, 1-250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. p. 23)
Agreed. The attitude of a “conservative” is along the lines: “The current system is pretty good, so change should be carefully considered and relatively slow”.
A “progressive” attitude would be: “The current system is fundamentally bad, we need radical change and preferably quite quickly”.
“Supposed” is doing a lot of work here. The evidence of the last 15-20 shows that academia is increasingly intolerant of free expression.
I suggest one contributor to the disparity in political views of academics compared to the general public is that the academics on hiring committees refuse to hire people with different political views. A small starting difference would immediately ratchet upwards.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Color me crazy, but wasn’t Colbert simply making fun of puffed shirts? Aren’t WE (unlike the hoi polloi) able to make facts what we want them to be?
I can’t accept that reality leans one way or the other. It’s just reality. My guess is that both conservatives and liberals claim that reality is on their side when it suits them. That doesn’t make it so.
Regarding the above figure: “Far Left/Liberal”, “Far Right/Conservative” – I’m not sure how to interpret the slash. Does it mean “or” or “=”? If the latter, it would be incorrect, because the Liberal Left isn’t the same as the Far Left, and the Conservative Right isn’t the same as the Far Right.
About 60% of academics identify as far left or liberal. This would not be a problem if most held reasonable positions, like Jerry or Steven Pinker. Unfortunately, many adopt extreme views, such as claiming that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza or that there are no differences at all between transgender and biological women. It is these absurdities that I find frustrating.
We (I) can make up something along these lines:
“Reality has a truth bias,
liberals and conservatives have their own”.
Expanding this and a little off the post.
Rattling around in my head is this thought of Einstein, arguably the ultimate realist of nature could not except his own equations on the expansion of the universe. Not once, but twice over separate issues he had to be persuaded by George Lemaître, a priest no less.
Of course, confirmed by Henrietta Leavitt and Edwin Hubble who provided the evidence.
Does this prove you can have a bias against yourself and truths at the same time …yes you can or am I just confused? 😁
A thing that seems overlooked about the above graph (or maybe I just missed it), is that it seems to track the overall leftward shift of academia, but is it really faculty in the sciences that have become far left lefties? I wonder. It is the humanities that has greatly expanded its range into various ‘departments of post-modernism’. So for that reason alone, one might expect to see that academia on the whole is seen to have moved leftward.
I suspect a plurality of self-identified “moderates” in the academy are more properly “liberals” when compared to the U.S. population rather than to their professional peers and neighbors. It only seems moderate when compared to Marxists, socialists, rabble-rousing activists, and other illiberal colleagues.
I will also quibble with the idea that “conservatives don’t like change.” This doesn’t hold for conservatives with the intellect and curiosity suitable for academic life—and there are many. They do resist the revolving door of faddish pursuits, the reflexive dismissal of the traditional as inherently oppressive, and a presentism that condemns the past by our own incontinent values. They remain open, shall we say, to the possibility that earlier generations sometimes possessed greater wisdom. Valuing stability does not mean one demands stasis.
Coel notes that the left readily rejects inconvenient science, but the rejection is even more sweeping in the humanities. Western civ, anyone? Canon wars? English majors at many leading universities can graduate without a Shakespeare course. Chaucer and Milton have largely disappeared, replaced by identity themes, pop culture, and media studies. History majors often complete degrees without foundational courses in U.S. history and government, while departments who still wish to teach such subjects struggle to find specialists in the U.S. founding era. Military history remains marginalized, as though warfare will end if you ignore it in the ivory towers. Humanities PhDs can pass through a decade or more of education with little meaningful engagement with Homer, Plato, and Dante—yet emerge fluent in “progressive” lingo, postmodern obscurities, and grievance frameworks.
Lets not forget that multiple surveys show that a large fraction of academics self-report that they will actively discriminate against conservatives in hiring, funding, and promotion. Depending how you ask the question, the fraction ranges from 80 to 20%. This, in my opinion, provides a simple explanation how academia has become so skewed towards progressivism.