I have been a member of the law faculty at Vanderbilt University for nearly twenty years. Even though my faculty has grown over that time, there are fewer conservatives now than when I joined. We are down to four—a mere ten percent or so of the tenure-track faculty—and two of the four are nearly 80. Remarkably, that probably makes us the most ideologically diverse department in the entire University.
Everywhere I turn, I hear university leaders saying we need more conservatives in academia. There is little doubt anymore that they are right: scholars need skeptics to point out research weaknesses; students need provocateurs to help them engage with unfamiliar ideas; we all need balanced academic studies to help us make good public policy. But what I do not hear from many of these leaders is how they are going to do it. I have been thinking about this for many years, and I have some bad news: it is going to be difficult. I canvass the possibilities below and propose massive external pressure as the most promising course. But, first, it may be illuminating to break the problem down into its components: supply and demand.
The Supply Problem
The supply problem is that very few conservatives want to go into academia. I don’t blame them. Conservatives are discriminated against at every level. At the bottom, I have seen my colleagues refuse to interview an amazing legal scholar for a job because he went to a very conservative undergraduate institution when he was 18 years old. In the middle, a conservative member of my tenure-track faculty has not led any of our dozen or so academic programs—and that’s where the money is—in over fifteen years. At the top, how many university academic leaders are conservative? To my knowledge, there are none at my university and very, very few anywhere else: a former law clerk to Justice Scalia was made the provost at Harvard—after he left the Republican Party.