Professors and Their Politics ed. by Neil Gross and Solon Simon (review)

Over the years, numerous scholars have conducted studies on the effect that the intersection of higher education and the political culture of the U.S. has had on faculty, students, staff, and society (for recent examples see: Maranto, Redding, & Hess, 2009; Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, & Woessner, 2011). However, there are few recent attempts to reveal or explain the changing higher education landscape and the concurrent political trends solely through the vantage point of professors. This intellectual oversight and the field’s inability to reconcile all the divergent yet related strands that sit at the intersection of politics and higher education is the primary rationale behind Neil Gross and Solon Simmons’ (2014) edited book, Professors and their Politics. Different from other efforts that have focused on students, politics, and higher education (e.g., Binder & Wood, 2013; Colby, Beaumont, Ehrlich, & Corngold, 2010), this edited volume seeks to illuminate and explain trends in higher education and politics from the perspective of faculty through a decidedly multidisciplinary approach. The core aim of the book that the editors put forth is that the topic area of higher education and politics is in need of renewal, and through rigorous empirical investigations contained in the book, scholars and policy makers might come to understand in “social science terms what is happening in the institution and to discover what these developments imply for state and society” (Gross & Simmons, 2014, p. 312).

In order to execute this goal, the book is organized into five major themes that build on one another to illuminate the interplay of politics and higher education from the faculty perspective. Part I, written by Gross and Simmons, attempts to lay the foundation for the volume by describing the findings of a study they conducted about the political views of contemporary professors. The findings from their study add nuance to the widely held belief that faculty are almost uniformly liberal. Their study found that many faculty hold “center-left” positions on numerous issues and may not be as “radically” liberal as portrayed in other venues. Furthermore, younger faculty (those entering the profession after September 11, 2001) in their study also held more moderate positions than their older colleagues, a point that the authors suggest may not have been captured in previous studies conducted about faculty who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, their major claim is that previous studies fail to capture the “heterogeneity of political opinion” that exists among faculty (p. 48). They go on to argue that while the professoriate could be fairly characterized as a liberal occupational field, they caution from the outset that faculty should not be viewed or treated as a monolith.

Paradoxically, Part 2 (Chapters 2–4) seeks to explain professorial liberalism, although the first chapter concludes that the reader should not see all faculty as uniformly liberal. Despite this, Chapter 2, written by Ethan Fosse, Jeremy Freese, and Gross, seeks to link professorial liberalism to graduate school attendance. They show, using survey data, that students who identify as liberal during college are most likely to attend graduate school and seek to become professors, yet attending graduate school only accounts for “modest shifts farther to the left” (p. 78). Thus, they conclude that a person possessing liberal political views serves a self-selection function, disrupting the commonly held belief that graduate school is the root of many professors’ liberal leanings. Chapter 3, authored by Clem Brooks, continues the examination of professorial liberalism by conducting a cross-national investigation between professors based in the U.S. and professors from other nations. Brooks categorizes the comparative nations as either social democracies, Christian democracies, liberal democracies, or East European nations. The major finding is that there is a considerable amount of heterogeneity and complexity in professor’s attitudes across regime type and institutional setting. This finding echoes that of the first chapter but builds on it by beginning to show how professional, gender, and public norms...