Political views of American academics

The political views of American academics began to receive attention during the 1950s, as a result of McCarthyism. Research studies have found higher percentages of liberals than of conservatives. Researchers disagree about methodology, causes, and interpretations of these findings. It is also an ongoing topic of discussion in the popular media.

Anti-communism and loyalty oaths

During the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy used the power of the United States government to enforce anti-Communism. Although they focused largely on persons in the government and entertainment, they also targeted university faculty. Members of the American Legion began accusing university faculty of being Communists. Universities responded by banning left-wing student groups and Communist speakers. The House Un-American Activities Committee summoned faculty members from the University of Washington, and three tenured faculty members were fired in 1949. Following passage of the Levering Act, faculty at the University of California were required to sign loyalty oaths. McCarthy's Senate committee investigated 18 faculty members at Sarah Lawrence College, some of whom were pressured to resign. According to historian Ellen Schrecker, "it is very clear that an academic blacklist was in operation during the McCarthy era," and numerous faculty members across the US, both tenured and untenured, lost their jobs. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a secret counterintelligence program in libraries, and in 1970 Hoover sent an open letter to US college students, advising them to reject leftist politics.

Research

Ford Foundation study

In 1955, Robert Maynard Hutchins led an effort within the Ford Foundation to document and analyze the effects of McCarthyism on academic freedom. He commissioned sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to conduct a study of university faculty in the United States, and the results were published by Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens in a book, The Academic Mind. As part of a survey of faculty views about Communism and free speech, they asked approximately 2,500 professors of social science a large number of questions, and found that about two thirds of these faculty members had been visited by the FBI. They also included a few questions about political party affiliations and recent voting patterns, and reported that there were more Democrats than Republicans, 47% to 16%. According to sociologist Neil Gross, the study was significant because it was the first effort to poll university faculty specifically about their political views.

Carnegie Commission on Higher Education

According to Gross, the Lazarsfeld and Thielens study had examined only a small population of faculty members, but a second study, conducted in 1969 on behalf of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, was the first to be performed with a large survey population, extensive questions about political views, and highly rigorous analytic methods. The study was conducted by political scientists and sociologists Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset, who collected data from more than 60,000 academics in all fields of study, at 303 colleges and universities, and who published their complete results in 1975 in the book The Divided Academy.

Ladd and Lipset found that about 46% of professors described themselves as liberal, 27% described themselves as moderates, and 28% described themselves as conservative. They also reported that faculty in the humanities and social sciences were the most liberal, while those in "applied professional schools such as nursing and home economics" and in agriculture were the most conservative. Younger faculty tended to be more liberal than older faculty, and faculty across the political spectrum tended to disapprove of the student activism of the 1960s.

Higher Education Research Institute

Self-reported political views of US academic faculty (% by year), according to the HERI Faculty Survey reports 1990–2014

Beginning in 1989, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) conducts a survey of American university faculty every three years and provides free access to data and weighted results. The HERI Faculty Survey gathers comprehensive information about the faculty experience, such as position, field, institutional details, and personal opinion and views, including one question asking respondents to self-identify their political orientation as "far left", "liberal", "moderate/middle of the road", "conservative", or "far right". Between 1989 and 1998, the survey showed negligible change in the number of professors who described themselves as far left or liberal, approximately 45%. As of 2014, surveying 16,112 professors, the percentage of liberal/far left had increased to 60%.

Professor Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College used HERI data to study regional political differences in academia and found the most pronounced to be in the northeast region of the United States. According to an essay he wrote in The New York Times, he concluded that, whereas the average ratio of liberal to conservative professors is 6:1 nationally, in New England, it is 28:1.

Later studies

Over subsequent decades, multiple other studies of academics in the US were conducted. They have generally reported numbers roughly similar to the Ladd and Lipset study, with some small shifts between liberal and conservative over time. Many of these studies have been plagued by methodological problems. Examining one study that had concluded that "complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study", four researchers from the University of Pittsburgh wrote that the "work is plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence... Unfortunately... they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community." Neil Gross and Solon Simmons concluded that, as of 2014, the numbers were approximately 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative, across a broad population of university faculty.

Effects on students

Reports that liberals significantly outnumbered conservatives became widely repeated in the popular press. Politically conservative authors have long argued that liberal faculty members outnumber conservative ones, and indoctrinate their students with liberal views, and recent research has focused increasingly on the extent of faculty influence on student beliefs. William F. Buckley made this argument in his 1951 work, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom", and works such has Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals have made similar arguments. Yancey claims there is little evidence that the political orientation of faculty members affects the political attitudes of their students. A 2008 study by Mack D. Mariani and Gordon J. Hewitt found no evidence that faculty ideology was "associated with changes in students' ideological orientation" and concluded that students at more liberal schools "were not statistically more likely to move to the left" than students at other institutions. Similarly, Stanley Rothman, April Kelly-Woessner, and Mathew Wossner found in 2010 that students' "aggregate attitudes do not appear to vary much between their first and final years," and wrote that this "raises some questions about charges that campuses politically indoctrinate students."

Effects on faculty

Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner also found in 2010 that 33% of conservative faculty say they are "very satisfied" with their careers, while 24% of liberal faculty say so. Over 90% of Republican-voting professors said that they would still become professors if they could do it all over again. The authors concluded that, although such numbers are not definitive as to how faculty members feel that they have been treated, they provide some evidence against the idea that conservative faculty members are systematically discriminated against. Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn interviewed 153 conservative professors for their 2016 book Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University. The authors wrote that these professors sometimes have to use "coping strategies that gays and lesbians have used in the military and other inhospitable work environments" in order to hide their political identity. Shields stated his view that the populist right may overstate the bias that does exist and that conservatives can succeed using mechanisms like academic tenure to protect their freedom. One outcome of these controversies was the creation in 2015 of the Heterodox Academy, a bipartisan organization of professors seeking to increase the acceptance of diverse political viewpoints in academic discourse.

Woessner and Kelly-Woessner also examined what might have given rise to the differences in the numbers of liberals and conservatives. They looked at the choices made by undergraduate students when planning future careers. They found that there were no differences in intellectual ability between conservative and liberal students, but that liberal students were significantly more likely to choose to pursue PhD degrees and academic careers, whereas conservative students of identical academic accomplishments were more likely to pursue business careers. They concluded that the greater numbers of liberal than conservative professors could be accounted for by self-selection in career paths, rather than by bias in hiring or promotion.

See also

• Academic bias
• Media bias
• Political correctness in education