Professors and Their Politics

1. The Social and Political Views of American College and University Professors

In 1955, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld set out to study how American social scientists were faring in the era of McCarthyism. Lazarsfeld employed interviewers from the National Opinion Research Center and Elmo Roper and Associates to speak with 2,451 social scientists at 182 American colleges and universities. A significant number of those interviewed reported feeling that their intellectual freedom was being jeopardized—although not as many as some scholars at the time predicted (Lazarsfeld and Thielens 1958). Lazarsfeld also asked his respondents about their politics. Analyzing the survey data on this score with Wagner Thielens in their 1958 book The Academic Mind, Lazarsfeld observed that liberalism and Democratic Party affiliation were more common among social scientists than within the general U.S. population and that social scientists at research universities were more liberal than their peers at teaching-oriented institutions. Although The Academic Mind was published too late to be of any help in the fight against McCarthy (Garfinkel 1987), it opened up a new and exciting area of sociological research: study of the political views of academicians. Sociologists of intellectual life had long been interested in the political sympathies of intellectuals (Kurzman and Owens 2002), but most previous work had been historical . In the wake of The Academic Mind, however, several studies appeared that aimed to chart the distribution of political beliefs among college and university professors, to do so using surveys, and to leverage from the effort not simply a better understanding of the academic intelligentsia but also broader insights into political processes. Such studies were given special urgency by the contentious politics of the 1960s, which often centered on college and university campuses and raised the question of the allegiances of professors. Everett Carll Ladd Jr., and Seymour Martin Lipset’s book The Divided Academy (1976), based largely on a nationally representative survey of the American faculty carried out c h a p t e r o n e The Social and Political Views of American College and University Professors neil gross and solon simmons 20 The Lay of the Land in 1969, was the most prominent of these investigations. But as Michael Faia noted in a 1974 article, some half a dozen others were published during the same period. While Faia himself charged that Lipset, in work published prior to The Divided Academy, had overestimated the liberalism of professors, these studies generally confirmed Lazarsfeld and Thielens’s finding that professors are more liberal than members of other occupational groups and concluded that insofar as this was so, professors “represent a negative case to the traditional equation of high socioeconomic status and political conservatism” (Finkelstein 1984, 169). This was important research into an occupation of growing significance in the post–World War II period, given the expansion of higher education during this time (Schofer and Meyer 2005) and the associated transformation of collegegoing from an “elite” to a “mass” phenomenon (Trow 1973). Much of the research was carried out with methodological savvy and theoretical sophistication, and although some of the researchers clearly hoped that the findings could make their way into policy debates, the core agenda was the advancement of social science. In the 1990s, a few sociologists continued to produce high-quality work on the topic (e.g., Hamilton and Hargens 1993; Nakhaie and Brym 1999). 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 (see Doumani 2006; Messer-Davidow 1993; Slaughter 1988; Wilson 1995), and much recent research on faculty political views has been beholden to this program. With this chapter we take a step toward moving the study of professorial politics back into the domain of mainstream sociological inquiry. We report on a survey of American college and university professors and their social and political attitudes that we carried out in 2006. Our purposes here are basic: to introduce the study and its methodology and lay out its findings. Where other recent studies have characterized the faculty as not simply extremely liberal but nearly uniformly so (Klein and Western 2004–5; Rothman...