Closed Minds?: Politics and Ideology in American Universities

5. Political Attitudes of American Professors: Results of a 2007 National Survey

Just how dominant are liberals and Democrats on American campuses today? Does the current tilt to the left among college professors affect the classroom experience of students and the tenure chances of conservative faculty members? The assumption among many conservative pundits in America today is that college professors as a class are dangerous radicals and left-wing ideologues. Numerous books portray America’s universities as havens for former hippies, who, having lost the battle for power in the America of today, have claimed the ivory tower as their exclusive fiefdom. Dinesh D’Souza, one of the cultural warriors of the 1990s, put it this way: Within the tall gates and old buildings, a new worldview is consolidating itself. The transformation of American campuses is so sweeping that it is no exaggeration to call it an academic revolution.1 Abigail Thernstrom, another conservative critic of the academy, labeled American campuses “islands of repression in a sea of freedom.”2 One might imagine that the subsequent absence of a significant shift among college graduates to the left in American politics would give critics pause. But the indictments, if anything, have grown more sweeping. David Horowitz, perhaps the most prominent and persistent conservative critic of academia, observed,“All students are being deprived of a decent education by the leftist monopoly on campus.”3 Conservative pundit Ann Coulter had this advice for college students: “Your professors and instructors are, by and large, evil peo5 Political Attitudes of American Professors: Results of a 2007 National Survey 71 ple whose main goal is to mislead you.”4 Professors are compared to tyrants, as in this attack on left-wing academics: I think it is a little naïve to suggest that we will fertilize academic freedom on campuses by enlightening leftists about how totalitarian they are. This is like saying that the way we could have prevented Stalin’s, Mao’s, and Pol Pot’s killing fields is if we had just patiently informed them that their ideology and practices were not allowing dissent and intellectual diversity and then they would have understood and become more tolerant. . . . The purpose of the Left is . . . to build a new and perfect world, which means that this present existence must be destroyed, so that the slate can be wiped clean to start building the earthly paradise it dreams of. The objective for education for leftists, therefore, is indoctrination.5 These are just some of the attacks by conservatives on the liberal elite that they believe populates and runs America’s universities and colleges.6 Recently, Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte have conducted a more empirical examination of alleged bias in the academy, which is impressive in the nature of their data and the bold character of their arguments.7 Rothman and his colleagues claimed to show that faculty today are more liberal than at any time in recent history and that they likely discriminate, consciously or unconsciously, against conservatives and Christians in hiring and promotion. These claims attracted broad media attention, demonstrating a strong public interest in the question of bias in higher education. A leftist critique of the universities also exists, of course, but it is as yet more diffuse than the conservative critique. Feminists, with University of Miami president (and President Clinton’s secretary of health and human services ) Donna Shalala as a prominent leader, have sought to mount an attack on the “culture” of the sciences and engineering fields for being inhospitable to women, and some have lobbied to have Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act Amendments reinterpreted to apply to educational programs and not merely to athletic programs.8 Many point to the inadequate representation of blacks and Hispanics among faculty and, to a lesser extent, students. Other critics have disparaged “legacy” admission policies, and many have complained that elite universities are dominated by the privileged classes. A cacophony of voices has urged colleges and universities with large endowments to spend more on student financial aid. There are those who argue, frequently but not always from the political left, that the American university, far from being hostile to capitalism and the market, has in fact been increasingly influenced and 72 Political Attitudes of American Professors even dominated by commercial forces and corporate values.9 This left wing criticism, however, seldom becomes part of the broad public discourse. The conservative critics of the academy we have just cited seem largely unaware...