Colleges and universities today manifest a paradoxical combination of remarkable success and abject failure. Vast resources and extensive funding for research have made our system of higher education the envy of the world—but its extraordinarily ideological homogeneity corrupts its contribution to American society. In their relentless liberalism, not only do our institutions of higher education fail to train liberal leaders capable of governing a pluralistic nation, the intolerance they foster stokes the fires of the culture wars.
Ideally, college and universities provide a world set apart, an “ivory tower” where debate and argument can take place at a remove from the usual pressures of power politics and economic competition. Needless to say, the ivory has never gleamed a spotless white. Donors, legislators, trustees, and fee-paying parents have all sorts of economic and political interests that inevitably exert influence. Meanwhile, even as they complain about these sorts of nonacademic pressures on university policy, the professors quietly maintain preferential faculty hiring for their spouses and preferential admission for their children. It turns out that there’s nothing about the academic life that exempts us from the consequences of the fall.
In spite of original sin, however, it’s not hard to picture American universities playing a positive civic role. The relative leisure of the college classroom provides opportunities for wide-ranging analysis and discussion of different visions of human flourishing, political arrangements, and policy options. Professors with different political views and cultural sensibilities share a common commitment to academic rigor, and this unifying culture of inquiry should allow them to mix it up on occasion in public debate without triggering ideological alarm bells. The same holds for invited speakers, endowed programs, and research centers.
In such a setting—which, I emphasize, is not hard to imagine—students would see reasoned debate at work. The various political outlooks on offer could be scrutinized, and even those who disagree might find themselves understanding why well-meaning people end up supporting policies, positions, and programs that are (to their minds at least) mistaken and ill considered. Encountering smart, well-informed, and well-spoken people who think differently about the world does a great deal to promote the development of a critical mind.
The gain is not just intellectual. We live in a gloriously pluralistic society. Thankfully, our political class gains its power from representing rather than dictating, and the most successful among them know how to broker deals and create coalitions across real but often bridgeable differences. In a healthy democratic culture, we don’t need cultural and political therapists or conflict resolution experts to manage our political differences. Instead, we need intelligent partisans who struggle to realize their competing visions of the common good, but do so with a sober recognition of their own limitations, as well as an appreciation for the intelligence and good intentions of their opponents.
The civic function of higher education is therefore obvious. A serious intellectual encounter with alternative views of morality, culture, and politics—an encounter given flesh and blood on a campus populated by faculty who carry forward these alternatives—prepares the mind for intelligent partisanship. If a liberal, for example, knows why a conservative opposes government run health care or abortion, he has the basis for discerning common ground on the margins of these disagreements, and perhaps on other issues as well. At an even more basic level, the liberal will find it difficult to simply pigeonhole conservatives as greedy, ignorant, and mean-spirited.
Unfortunately, this does not happen in higher education. As civic institutions, our colleges and universities have become closed communities of the like-minded. Conservative ideas are never engaged but only ignored and dismissed.
The raw numbers are shocking. As a 2007 study by Neil Gross at Harvard and Solon Simmons at George Mason shows, the professoriate has become ideologically homogeneous. Once we strip out the natural scientists, who rarely weigh in on cultural and political issues, the percentage of self-described conservatives in academia drifts down to around 4 percent of all faculty. Data from elite universities indicates even fewer. As Louis Menand reports in a recent book about some of the challenges facing higher education, The Marketplace of Ideas, the number of social science professors at elite universities who voted for George Bush in 2004 was so small that it came to a statistical value of 0 percent. Humanities professors? Zero percent.
The trends have nuance. Gross and Simmons observe that younger faculty continue to be overwhelming liberal, but less ardently so. Nonetheless, the overall picture is clear. As a student or professor or anyone else who has a passing acquaintance with higher education knows, American higher education is a closed shop. There are of course exceptions—Pepperdine, University of Dallas, Hillsdale, and others. Moreover, most schools have one or two courageous, articulate conservatives like Robert George at Princeton. But for every exception there are thousands who fall in line according to the ruling ideology of academic: an establishmentarian liberalism eager to accommodate the more extreme views on the Left, but (with the notable exception of departments of economics) unwilling to tolerate representatives of mainstream conservatism.
Why academia is so relentlessly homogeneous is a difficult question to answer. Menand offers some jejune observations in a few short, half-hearted paragraphs. Liberals, he observes, are more critical and thus attracted to academic life; conservatives want to make more money in lucrative professions. He even makes the bizarre suggestion that “there may be fewer institutional havens for left-wing intellectuals than there are for right-wing intellectuals, so liberals tend to congregate in universities, conservatives elsewhere—in foundations or, during the years of the Bush administration, in Washington.” The sociological ignorance behind such a statement boggles the mind.
Anecdotal evidence suggests a more plausible answer. There is widespread blackballing of conservative job candidates in the hiring process, and an atmosphere of intense hostility discourages conservative undergraduate and graduate students from going forward in academia. Consider one topic of controversy in the public square. Although voters consistently reject same-sex marriage, it’s hard to think of a single elite school where a published argument against same-sex marriage, no matter how nuanced and responsibly argued, wouldn’t mobilize powerful faculty members to block an appointment. And they would almost certainly succeed, as indeed they have on countless occasions involving this and other issues.
Discussions about causes aside, the bizarre social reality is plain to see. A 2009 Gallup poll indicates that 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative or very conservative. Twenty-one percent call themselves liberal or very liberal, while most of the rest describe themselves as moderates. The academy, meanwhile, tilts overwhelmingly to the left. George W. Bush was the first president since Ronald Reagan to be elected by an absolute majority—and that majority is statistically absent from elite universities, and barely present at the rest. The conclusion is irresistible. Our present academic culture continues to churn out good scientific research, but as a civic institutions our colleges and universities have become profoundly and dangerously perverted.
In my adult life I have experienced something few suspected possible when I was a young college student in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the success of conservatism as a governing philosophy. It has shown itself to be the source of compelling new ideas, as well as capable of building a capacious coalition in the Republican Party, a coalition that has elected Presidents in recent decades who can work with leaders from both parties to pass legislation and chart national policy.
As a professor for twenty years, I have come to see that the success of conservatism may indirectly owe a great deal to our distorted academic culture. Today, American liberalism is perhaps fatally hobbled by a fossilized outlook and parochial arrogance. These qualities are unfortunately encouraged by the civic failure of higher education. Of course conservatives can be aggressive, arrogant, and small-minded. We’re human. But few conservatives are so insulated from reality as to imagine that no thinking and well-intentioned person could disagree. After all, most of us had professors in college whom we respected—whom we admired and to whom we were devoted—but whose political views we thought wrong-headed. Sadly, never needing to encounter sophisticated representatives of conservative ideas while college students, many liberals are sorely tempted to treat those who oppose them with a patronizing critical hauteur—clinging to their guns and religion, as then candidate Barack Obama said in an unguarded but surely honest moment.
It’s not good for America to have a major political party and important elite institutions dominated by people trained to ignore—or worse, sneer at—the conservative ways of thinking that motivate most Americans. The civic failure of higher education has contributed to this sad state of affairs, and, unfortunately, there are no signs that it will change. Although he likes to fashion himself an outsider of sorts, formerly of Columbia and now at Harvard, Louis Menand is an archetypical member of our academic establishment. He gave his book on higher education an ironic title: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. Marketplace of Ideas? American colleges and universities run a monopoly business, not an open marketplace. Like most of the academic mandarins, who by and large are academic specialists rather than political ideologues, Menand shrugs his shoulders and leaves things as they are.
R.R. Reno is senior editor at large of First Things.
Comments:
The last Republican presidents have not shown the most effective examples of governance. The professed desire to dismantle social support programs is an example of mean spiritedness.
A couple years before I retired, we conducted a faculty search. One of my colleagues did a websearch on one candidate and discovered he was a member of an evangelical church. My colleague was unaware of the differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals (or Catholics for that matter) and was very concerned that we might hire a Christian fanatic of some sort. I tried to reassure her that the second coming of the inquisition was not at hand, but to no avail. She was genuinely concerned.
She, herself, of course was a radical feminist who would only advise female graduate students, and was open about her bigotry.
Also, in the faculty garage I used, which was almost universally engineering, no conservation bumper sticker was ever seen.
The students are actually more varied than the professors, even at Harvard, where Summers was popular among the students. At the last graduation ceremony that he attended there, he was given a standing ovation by parents and students, who appreciated his goal to reform the shortcomings of our professiorate. Of course, the professors did not appreciate his request that they publish scholarship rather than rap music. At least one professor did not appreciate that request. He immediately decamped to Princeton.
This contempt seems to bleed bleed out into my colleagues' view of the world in general, to structure their view of life, as it were, as they seem to go through their days with a perpetual sneer of superiority on their faces, as in the case of a campus administrator who I heard remark that there was no need to worry about offending conservative students because 'conservative student' was an oxymoronic statement anyhow.
I give myself the (small) consolation that a statistically significant number of undergraduates have no interest, in any event, in the sort of classic liberal education that is made wonderful through the open marketplace of ideas. Rather, they are simply interested in the economic benefits of a college diploma in a society that seems to have developed a bad case of credential-itis, or alternately, simply go to college because that is what one does, after high school.
It is small consolation, though, to make the argument that self-censorship in the service of self-preservation (I have to feed my children, for instance) is fine, since what we are doing doesn't matter all that much anyway. It is not healthy for a society to harbor in its midst institutions populated by large numbers of contemptuous cynics whose contempt is made worse through the knowledge that their views are subsidized (in the case of public institutions) by those who are held in contempt.
Given that possibility that graduates go on to adopt this contemptuous posture after leaving the university, this leaves one in the unenviable position of hoping that students' invincible apathy remains exactly that, as the lesser of two evils.
For my part, I remain open to arguments as to whether liberal higher education in its present formation is worth fighting for (thus making closet dissent akin to cowardice), or whether it is too rotten to be worth the trouble (thus freeing dissenters from the moral obligation to commit career suicide by speaking up).
As a former Dean of Academic Affairs at a largely conservative leaning college, I often inquired (of the political science professors whom we hired) why they wished to be considered by our search committees. Invariably they would mention the fact that their less-than-ultra-liberal views essentially rendered them as outcasts at the universities from which they were fleeing, and though tenured, they could no longer abide the ambience.
d says, you're painting a lot of people with an awfully broad brush, as restrictions on social support programs have been enacted at state levels too, and require (in many cases) the support of many other legislators. I guess you're far better at reading the minds of complete strangers than I am...
I can't help but look at your statement and think of a question posed recently by one of my students. He asked why God doesn't answer every prayer. I asked him to think of the most selfish, inconsiderate individual he knew. I then asked what he thought made that person that way.
He replied that the guy was spoiled by his parents, and got everything he asked for, regardless of whether he deserved it. Deprivation tends to make us more charitable ourselves, stronger, and more courageous than unrestricted plenitude. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention (and all true progress).
Are there many that desperately need social support? Yes, but "social support" is not a check you get in the mail, or a box of prescription pills from Medicaid.
True SOCIAL support is the charity, friendship, and concern that come from neighbors and *gasp* church members who reach out not only with material aid, but social concern. There is nothing truly "social" about aid from the government.
And I wonder, if government gives us everything we clamor for, what makes us different from a spoiled teen stuck in childhood?
Elite schools? Try 98% of Catholic schools!!!
Afterwards, I asked a beleaguered (but popular, with students) Catholic historian why he thought I was rejected. My GRE scores were about as high as they could be, I had other qualifications -- what was the problem? Christian intellectual history was just not the sort of thing professors there were interested in, he seemed to suggest. He added that years before, the faculty had been conventionally liberal, and in the spirit of liberality had elected hard-left faculty members, Marxists and radical feminists. What they hadn't bargained for was that the new faculty members did not share their democratic values, thus a more radical leftward tilt.
Anyway, if there are almost no remaining conservatives in the university, I wonder how that relates to the high percentage of atheists one also finds there. (The vast majority of philosophers at leading schools are apparently atheists, for instance.) Also the fact that the American academy has become a wildlife refuge for ideological species elsewhere endangered, such as Marxists.
Anyone have any thoughts?
These kinds of articles usually focus on a general culture. But present academic culture achieved and secured dominance because of particular acts, and sometimes even particular rules and laws.
Hostility to opponents of same-sex "marriage," for instance, derives from the institutionalization of identity politics, which in turn arose from (and gave rise to) anti-discrimination laws and credentialing regulations. Surface academic bias reflects deep structural biases which privilege leftists and encourage the continuous expansion of non-discriminatory attitudes.
Campus activism is useful in securing funding and in expanding cultural power throughout the private sector. Keeping conservatives off campus may be a secondary effect of this activity.
Also the ideological hothouse of academia makes anti-discrimination lawsuits a real threat. That murderous biology professor in Georgia had filed such a lawsuit. Leftism is likely a necessary shield for many professional academics.
I suspect feminism could not have begun to dominate Catholic campuses without the Civil Rights Act as outside leverage.
What's worse is that the academic environment has been recapitulated in government and in business, including media and entertainment businesses, through the "Diversity Industry." This has cut skeptical conservatives off from leadership positions and institutional power, to the point where the status quo appears irreformable.
About the only hope for conservative sentiment is its establishment as an identity group on campus. Perhaps a center for pro-life studies and activities on a Catholic campus, or a center for family and marriage preparation, could form a beachhead for reform as well as places to direct students in helpful directions.
But the conservative academic's plight will endure without removing the laws which disable him, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Personally, I have cut way back on general contributions to my college and transferred them directly individual conservative professors. I have, also, made it a point in alumni publications to encourage others to do so, much to the chagrin of the effete liberal administrators that infest the college.
If you're saying "98% of Catholic schools" block the appointment of faculty who differ with Church teaching, you're either grossly ignorant, or blatantly lying.
The typical student who considers himself conservative or at any rate is full of doubt about the reigning liberal pieties -- sure, he tends to steer clear of graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences because of the "intense atmosphere of hostility" but also because it's company that, on the whole, he doesn't admire. For one thing, especially in the humanities, there's a lot of bad writing. People get rewarded for expressing safe, simple ideas in complicated language. Or rather they get rewarded not so much for any ideas at all as for the jargon and its attendant atmospherics. Remember Alan Sokal?
Here's an anecdote for you: A grad student in English at Columbia circa 1995 is talking about her discipline. I forget now exactly the names she drops. Mostly French and German literary theorists who are in vogue at the time would be my guess. Then at some point in her riff she mentions Lionel Trilling and laughs. What's supposed to be funny about associating his name with those of the theory heavyweights is that he is (as she assumes I assume) a lightweight. And I get a whiff of what Trilling stands for in the minds of my grad-student friend and her colleagues – naive (that is, lucid and gracefully written) literary criticism that, what’s worse, reflects skepticism about the received wisdom of the guild.
Trilling never self-identified as a conservative. But he did enjoy engaging with ideas that were counter-liberal. He liked to try them on and decide which parts of them he and his peers actually believed in despite their protesting (too much?) that they didn't. What he shared with conservatives was exasperation at the intellectual complacency of tenured intellectuals. I don’t know what he was like as a teacher or mentor, but from his writing I imagine an academic whose presence on the faculty a conservative graduate student would have found encouraging. That he would have found Trilling’s presence encouraging is probably one reason that Trilling’s stock has dropped in recent years.
As for atheists, I've been questioned how I can be a scientist when I believe God is messing with stuff in my test tube. This sort of attitude is rampant and difficult to budge, not to mention extremely discouraging when you're a first-year grad student.
I came to college hoping for just the sort of marketplace of ideas that Reno talks about in the article, where one could learn to hone argument and rhetoric, and discover some universal truths. My take: there is very little learning going on in undergraduate. College is all about socialization and indoctrination. Who wants to teach a bunch of people who don't want to be there (after all, college is for partying and networking and experimenting socially), who only care about the grade, who have no idea the true joy that learning is?
Am I pursuing academia? Not the tenure-track. Between wondering how to fit in at a large research institution when you're a conservative, and having to move all over (as Adam posted) being hard on family, and no desire to teach undergraduates who feel entitled to an "A" for doing the minimum work, pursuing a tenure-track position in academia is not for me. That explains one absent conservative academic.
None of the schools got a cent. The college had capitulated, cross-gartered and grinning, to Evangelical feminism, and data presented in the publications of the National Association of Scholars made it clear where the two state universities were. Everything went to other organizations my father had supported, or of which I was sure he would approve.
Perhaps the greatest scandal of present conditions is that the academy makes it increasingly difficult for anyone with opinions labeled conservative to pursue graduate education, particularly in the humanities. It is not just that they are denied the credential (for credentials may be damned), but the intensive advanced study, fine libraries, and critical supervision, that leads to real mastery and its authority in the culture.
I hope a massive redirection of giving among those who care about liberal education in the classical sense will give rise in the next generation to new opportunities for graduate training among those who are repelled by the ideology of the schools. This, however, needs to be accompanied by active attention to what is done in them, and the willingness to redirect the giving away from those that go bad.
Outside of a few Ivy Leagers studying SOG or PMC's (PW Singer ,etc.,)there is no interest in military history. The illusion of world peace is necessary for superfluous spending.
A Nobel loriate was called "racist"and forced into retirement for declaring himself "pessimistic" about the chances for racial equality. Wheather genetic research should be treated as interchangeable superfluous pork is irrelevant to the fact that it is, and has been since the war on cancer to save Kodak. The human genome project was also an attempt to shore up upstate NY.
When the established interests thought they were going under, The Neo-Keynesians and the Phillips curve were rehabilitated. Inflation is kind to debtors and stockholders. Just before his death, also before the inflation of the 60's and stagflation of the 70's ; Lord Keynes said: I am afraid that today I would not be considered a Keynesian.
The humanities are over-run with claptrap as a means of maximizing enrollment and graduations, and eliciting the greatest financial support from those who subsidize.
Reno's claim that "American colleges and universities run a monopoly business, not an open marketplace" is absurd considering the incredible diversity of colleges and universities supported by a wide variety of governmental, church, and private non-profit organizations. Compare this to the choices that American capitalism has given the consumer: coke vs. pepsi, AT&T vs. Sprint, etc. There is incredible diversity in American colleges and universities, and it has paid off in a marketplace of ideas that have enriched our culture. Reno himself was a professor and a product of this system. If most academics did not vote for George Bush, it may have been because they were smart enough to spot a president who was damaging the American economy and destroying American prestige abroad.
To support my reading of the Gross and Simmons article I offer the following quotation from their conclusions:
"We have shown that there is more heterogeneity of political opinion among the professoriate than second wave studies have recognized. Although we would not contest the claim that professors are one of the most liberal occupational groups in American society, or that the professoriate is a Democratic stronghold, we have shown that there is a sizable, and often ignored, center/center-left contingent within the faculty; that on several important attitude domains – and in terms of overall political orientation – moderatism appears to be on the upswing; that, according to several measures, it is liberal arts colleges, and not elite, PhD granting institutions that house the most liberal faculty; and that there is much disagreement among professors about the role that politics should play in teaching and research."
Besides higher education failing in civic formation, Catholic higher education is similarly flawed in terms of Catholic formation. Dr. Reno's school is better than many, but countenanced a dissident theologian, Michael Lawler (now retired, I believe, and under discipline from the bishop) for far too long.
By the way, there's a small error in history. George W. Bush was not elected by a majority. He actually had fewer popular votes than Al Gore in 2000. (This was one time in my life when I said a prayer of thanks to God for our strange institution, the Electoral College!) It would be true to say that George W. Bush was RE-elected by a majority.