Political views of American academics

The political views of American academics began to receive attention in the mid-20th century, during the rise of McCarthyism. Demographic 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.

McCarthyism and loyalty oaths

Main article: McCarthyism

Although government employees and entertainment figures were most often investigated for alleged communist sympathies during the "Second Red Scare" of the 1950s, many university faculty were accused as well. Earlier, in the 1940s, the Rapp-Coudert Committee had investigated faculty of the City College of New York for communist involvement. In 1951, Members of the American Legion began accusing various 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. Joseph 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. In 1970, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover sent an open letter to US college students, advising them to reject leftist politics, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI conducted a secret counterintelligence program in libraries.

Demographic surveys

Ford Foundation

Paul Lazarsfeld conducted the first survey of faculty political opinions in the United States.

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

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 what Neil Gross characterized as highly rigorous analytic methods. The study was conducted in 1969 by political scientist Everett Carll Ladd and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who surveyed 60,000 academics in all fields of study at 303 institutions about their political views. Publishing their results in the 1975 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.

Smaller follow-up surveys on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation held in 1975, 1984, 1989, and 1997 showed an increased trend among professors toward the left, apart from a small movement to the right in 1984. By the 1997 study, 57% of professors identified as liberals, 20% moderates, and 24% conservatives.

Later studies

Later studies became increasingly politicized, and some have been plagued by methodological problems. In 2014, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons wrote: "In the 1990s, a few sociologists continued to produce high-quality work on the topic. But an unfortunate tendency became evident: increasingly, those social scientists who turned their attention to professors and politics and employed the tools of survey research had as their goal simply to highlight the liberalism of the professoriate in order to provide support for conservatives urging the political reform of American colleges and universities. The past twenty years or so have witnessed a concerted mobilization on the part of conservative activists, think tanks, foundations and professors aimed at challenging so-called liberal hegemony in higher education, and much recent research on faculty political views has been beholden to this program."

Higher Education Research Institute

Beginning in 1989, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has conducted a survey of full-time faculty at American four-year colleges and universities every three years. The HERI Faculty Survey gathers comprehensive information about the faculty experience, such as position, field, institutional details, and personal opinion and views, including a single 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%. When asked in 2012 about the significance of the findings on political views, the director of HERI, Sylvia Hurtado, said that the numbers on political views attract a lot of attention, but that this attention may be misplaced because there may be trivial reasons for the shifts.

North American Academic Survey Study

Ladd and Lipset, who had conducted the original Carnegie survey, designed a telephone survey in 1999 of approximately 4000 faculty, administrators, and students, called the North American Academic Survey Study (NASS). Stanley Rothman, the project lead after the passing of Ladd and Lipset, published a paper using NAASS data along with Neil Nevitte and S. Robert Lichter which concluded "complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study". Four researchers from the University of Pittsburgh wrote in a response that there were serious methodological concerns and that the raw data had not been made available to other researchers. Rothman along with co-authors Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner reported their extended findings in a book titled The Still Divided Academy.

Politics of the American Professoriate

Neil Gross and Solon Simmons conducted a study in 2006 with the intent of minimizing confounders, and concluded that, as of 2014, the numbers were approximately 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative, across a broad population of university faculty. When Gross and Simmons first reported their research, the Inside Higher Education reported that while some scholars - such as economist Lawrence H. Summers - took issue with how Gross and Simmons had interpreted their data, "there was widespread praise for the way the survey was conducted, with Summers and others predicting that their data may become the definitive source for understanding professors' political views." Gross and Simmons later discussed their findings in a book called Professors and Their Politics, and sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz described the book as "a welcome addition to sociological literature examining higher education, which, in the case of its intersection with politics, has not received serious attention since Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Theilen's classic study of 1958 and Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carll Ladd's 1976 work."

Regional and disciplinary variations

Steven Pinker has advocated for more acceptance of political diversity in the social sciences.

Several studies have found that the political views of academics vary considerably between different regions of the United States, and between academic disciplines. In a 2016 opinion column in The New York Times, for example, political scientist Samuel J. Abrams used HERI data to argue that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty varied greatly between regions. According to Abrams, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors was highest in New England, where this ratio was 28:1, compared to 6:1 nationally. Abrams also commented on these findings that "This previously unspecified ideological imbalance on campuses has led to cries of discrimination against right of center professors and scores of reports from both academic and popular press sources which have chronicled the concerns with this "beleaguered" and "oppressed" minority on campus... The data clearly reveal that conservative faculty are not only as satisfied with their career choice – if not more so – as their liberal counterparts, but that these faculty are also as progressive in their teaching methods and maintain almost identical outlooks toward their personal and professional lives.

Business professor Mitchell Langbert examined variations in political party registration in 2018. He described a higher concentration of Democrats in elite liberal arts institutions in the northeast, and found more Democrats among female faculty than male faculty. He also found the greatest ratio of Democrats to Republicans in interdisciplinary studies and the humanities, and the lowest ratio in professional studies and science and engineering.

Focusing specifically on social psychology academics, a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1." The six authors, all from different universities and members of the Heterodox Academy, also said, by 2012, "that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal psychologists" according to Arthur C. Brooks. Academy member Steven Pinker described the study as "one of the most important papers in the recent history of the social sciences". Russell Jacoby questioned the focus of the study on the social sciences rather than STEM fields saying that the "reason is obvious: Liberals do not outnumber conservatives in many of those disciplines".

Effects

On students

Since the modern conservative movement in the United States began in the mid-20th century, conservative authors have argued that college students are unduly influenced or indoctrinated as a result of the prevalence of liberal faculty at their schools. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom" (1951) brought focus to this trend by criticizing social scientists at his recent alma mater Yale university, whom he accused of promoting secular ideology, collectivist values, and redistributionist Keynesian economics to the student body over Christian ethics and respect for private property.. Other 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. George Yancey argues that 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."

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. 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.

One outcome of these controversies was the founding of the Heterodox Academy in 2015, a bipartisan organization of professors seeking to increase the acceptance of diverse political viewpoints in academic discourse. As of February 2018, over 1500 college professors had joined Heterodox Academy. The group publishes a ranking which rates the top 150 universities in the United States based on their commitment to diversity of viewpoint.

Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn surveyed 153 conservative professors for their 2016 study 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 preserve their political identity. One tactic used by about one-third of the professors was to "pass" (or pretend) to hold liberal views around their colleagues. 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.

See also

• Academic bias
• Media bias
• Political correctness in education