Frederick Hess & Annika Marshall
The ideological tilt of academe is striking. Today, 60 percent of faculty identify as far left or liberal and just 12 percent as conservative. Fifty-four percent of humanities faculty and 45 percent of social sciences faculty say that terms such as “radical,” “activist,” “Marxist,” or “socialist” describe them at least moderately well. Republicans make up just six percent of political science faculty (and even less of history or literature faculty).
While complaints about a campus monoculture are nothing new, higher ed’s defenders are prone to argue that progressive bias doesn’t ultimately matter because scholars are professionals who don’t allow their personal views to color their teaching or research. Indeed, some prominent campus voices dismiss talk of viewpoint diversity as a “MAGA plot.”
To sort through all this, AEI last week hosted a webinaron why higher education’s ideological tilt matters for academic research and teaching, featuring three scholars who’ve tackled this topic over the past year: Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute; the Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Minella; and Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College. Their findings suggest that airy claims of scholarly detachment and neutrality miss the mark. Collectively, the researchers described a teaching and research enterprise warped by ideological dogma.
Take teaching. Last year, Shields and two colleagues dove into 27 million college syllabi to examine the texts college students are assigned to read on controversial topics like criminal justice and abortion. The most widely assigned texts were celebrated left-leaning works like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. But the team was more interested in how frequently these canonical progressive works were paired with “their most important intellectual critics.” The answer? Rarely. Nine times out of ten, no works are assigned that offer a competing perspective. As they explain, “It seems that professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreements . . . That is the academic norm, at least in the cases we studied.”