Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?

Neil Gross, Neil Gross

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674059092
• eBook ISBN: 9780674074514
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Some observers see American academia as a bastion of leftist groupthink that indoctrinates students and silences conservative voices. Others see a protected enclave that naturally produces free-thinking, progressive intellectuals. Both views are self-serving, says Neil Gross, but neither is correct. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? explains how academic liberalism became a self-reproducing phenomenon, and why Americans on both the left and right should take notice.

Academia employs a higher percentage of liberals than nearly any other profession. But the usual explanations—hiring bias against conservatives, correlations of liberal ideology with high intelligence—do not hold up to scrutiny. Drawing on a range of original research, statistics, and interviews, Gross argues that "political typing" plays an overlooked role in shaping academic liberalism. For historical reasons, the professoriate developed a reputation for liberal politics early in the twentieth century. As this perception spread, it exerted a self-selecting influence on bright young liberals, while deterring equally promising conservatives. Most professors' political views formed well before they stepped behind the lectern for the first time.

Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? shows how studying the political sympathies of professors and their critics can shed light not only on academic life but on American politics, where the modern conservative movement was built in no small part around opposition to the "liberal elite" in higher education. This divide between academic liberals and nonacademic conservatives makes accord on issues as diverse as climate change, immigration, and foreign policy more difficult.

Chapter 1

The Politics of American Professors

Colleges and universities are linchpin institutions in American society. In the United States today there are more than 4,400 schools offering postsecondary instruction to nearly 20 million students.¹ Seventy percent of young adults take college courses of some kind, and nearly a third earn bachelor’s degrees—three times the number that did so in the early 1970s.² Not just because of the large number of tuition-paying undergraduates but also because of the equally dramatic expansion of graduate and professional training, a growing emphasis within science and technology fields on producing research with commercial application, new expectations among student consumers that a multitude of services and products be made available to them on campus, and the increasing complexity of the university—which has required hiring legions of administrators as well as a massive support staff—higher education is now a multibillion-dollar industry. It provides direct or indirect employment to millions of Americans and is connected to most other sectors of the economy.³

Higher education institutions are no less important in noneconomic terms. While scholarship characterizing the United States as a “knowledge society” often highlights the role of advanced technical and scientific knowledge in providing a basis for economic growth, the flip side is that knowledge, as embedded in computers, new pharmaceuticals, complex financial instruments, or economic reports, now permeates everyday life.⁴ Colleges and universities are key sites for the production, coordination, retention, and dissemination of knowledge. Beyond that, for many students where they went to school has become an essential marker of personal identity, while the social connections made there can affect opportunities, friendships, even marriage prospects for decades to come.⁵

Although at most schools professors have little to do with student life (as critics are quick to point out), in other respects they are at the heart of this enterprise, doing the research and imparting the knowledge that give higher education its reason for being. Altogether there are 1.4 million people who serve as professors or instructors in higher education, making up about 1% of the employed U.S. labor force.⁶ About half are employed full time; the rest work in an adjunct capacity. The growth of the part-time faculty, which began in the 1970s but accelerated in the 1990s due to cost pressures, is one of several significant changes the American academic profession has undergone in recent decades—changes that have been thoroughly documented by higher education researchers.⁷ But when it comes to knowing exactly how members of this important occupational group line up politically, scholars have not always had complete information.

The first step in explaining a social phenomenon is simply to get a grasp on it descriptively. That is what I aim to do in this chapter for the liberalism of the professoriate. To provide a bit of historical background, I begin by recounting two landmark studies on the topic from the mid-twentieth century. I then discuss the limited and sometimes problematic research on professorial politics carried out in the past fifteen years or so before painting my own portrait of the political landscape of contemporary academe.

Higher education is much talked about today. But so has it been for a long while. In the 1950s and 1960s, when college enrollments began their meteoric rise, the size of the faculty expanded rapidly, and massive federal investment in research paved the way for American academic dominance, leading social scientists often turned their attention to higher education in the hopes of contributing to an emerging national conversation about the university. Two of the studies they produced put professorial politics front and center.

The first was by sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld.⁸ The context was McCarthyism. Americans in government service were the main targets in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out subversives, but academics also came in for close examination. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates that “almost 20 percent of the witnesses called before congressional and state investigating committees were college teachers or graduate students.”⁹ In 1955 an arm of the Ford Foundation, led by former University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, took up the cause of documenting the scope of these investigations and their consequences for academic freedom and civil discourse. Hutchins commissioned Lazarsfeld to conduct a study.

Lazarsfeld, a Jewish refugee from Vienna appropriately sensitive to threats to freedom, was also a pioneer in the use of social surveys, and he and his colleagues developed an extensive questionnaire to probe professors’ experiences and perceptions of political scrutiny. He chose to limit his study to social scientists, since in his view this was the group most likely to “deal with controversial topics in their courses” and hence feel the heat from McCarthy and his allies.¹⁰ A team of researchers fanned out across the country to administer the questionnaire to a random sample of 2,451 social scientists—historians, economists, sociologists, and political scientists, mostly—teaching at 182 colleges and universities. The data did not show that academia was being decimated by McCarthyism. Just over a fifth of respondents gave an affirmative answer to the question “In the past few years, have you felt that your own academic freedom has been threatened in any way?”¹¹ The majority detected little change from “6 or 7 years ago” in the willingness of their colleagues to express “unpopular political views in the classroom,” “unpopular political views publicly in the community,” or “unpopular political views privately among friends.”¹² True, nearly half of respondents said that some faculty members at their institutions were more worried about political repression than before. But while there was agreement that “there is greater concern these days … on the part of the public and groups outside the college over teachers’ political opinions,” only half of the social scientists surveyed thought this concern harmful.¹³ Summing up their findings, Lazarsfeld, writing with coauthor Wagner Thielens Jr. in 1958, observed, “There is indeed widespread apprehension among … social science teachers, but in general it is hardly of a paralyzing nature; the heads of these men and women are ‘bloody but unbowed.’ ”¹⁴

Of equal significance was another set of findings. Savvy researcher that he was, Lazarsfeld thought to ask his respondents not just about academic freedom but also about their political views. He found that social scientists composed a remarkably liberal group. Well before the GOP’s hard turn to the right in the 1970s and 1980s, just 16% of social scientists surveyed said they were Republicans.¹⁵ Forty-seven percent said they were Democrats. Of those who reported voting in the 1952 presidential election, 65% voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, while in the country as a whole Stevenson got 44% of the vote.¹⁶ Lazarsfeld did not ask his respondents to classify themselves as liberal or conservative, but he did ask whether they thought they were more or less liberal than the average person in the community where they worked. Sixty-seven percent responded “more liberal.”¹⁷ The professors in his sample also scored high on an index measuring “permissive” attitudes toward communism.¹⁸

Lazarsfeld’s finding that social science leans left surely came as no surprise to conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr., whose 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, took special aim at economists, sociologists, and psychologists in New Haven said to be promoting a statist, redistributionist, secularizing agenda.¹⁹ Indeed, it was the reputation of academia more generally as a hotbed for left/liberal views—a reputation already well established midcentury—that helped bring it to the attention of McCarthy. Still, the book by Lazarsfeld and Thielens was a major contribution. Earlier sociologists had written on the politics of intellectuals, but Lazarsfeld and Thielens were the first to document the political beliefs and orientations of the professoriate using empirical data so systematically collected. Their book also went beyond description by offering a preliminary theory of professorial politics—a theory of the “academic mind,” discussed in Chapter 2.

The second major twentieth-century study of American professors’ politics also relied on survey data, although the context for it was very different. The 1960s were obviously years of great social and political unrest, and colleges and universities were battlegrounds. Undergraduates were on the front lines of most of the major movements of the day, and protests and sit-ins became everyday occurrences on campuses across the country.²⁰ Needless to say, mass student protest was unsettling for higher education. The research enterprise hardly ceased, but many professors and administrators found the 1960s to be trying and wondered about the long-term ramifications. Would the disruption continue indefinitely? Would efforts to accommodate student demands do irreparable harm to the university? To what extent, though, were these concerns widely shared? For every stodgy old academic who denounced campus radicals as hoodlums, it seemed, could be found a younger scholar who appreciated what they were doing.

It was to shed light on this issue—on the question of whether the protests of the 1960s had produced a “divided academy”—that political scientist Everett Carll Ladd and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset undertook a new study of professors and politics.²¹ With funding from the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, and working jointly with higher education scholar Martin Trow (who would soon publish a book about the politics of British academics), they fielded a survey in 1969 that dwarfed Lazarsfeld’s in size.²² It included more than 60,000 respondents drawn from 303 colleges and universities, ranging from junior colleges to prestigious Ivy League schools. Unlike Lazarsfeld, Ladd and Lipset surveyed professors in all disciplines. And because they wanted to determine if there was a relationship between being liberal on national issues and being liberal on matters of campus politics, they asked numerous questions about respondents’ political beliefs.

Three key findings stand out from their research. First, echoing what Lazarsfeld had found looking only at social scientists, Ladd and Lipset reported that the professoriate as a whole was much more liberal and Democratic than the rest of the population. About 46% of professors in their survey identified themselves as left or liberal, 27% as middle of the road, and 28% as conservative.²³ By contrast, only 20% of the American public in 1970 was left or liberal. (The number among college students was 45%.) Professors also voted for Democratic presidential candidates at a substantially higher rate than the general electorate in every election since 1944, and especially since 1948.²⁴ The liberal self-identification and voting practices of the faculty, Ladd and Lipset found, carried through to their views on major issues of the day, such as the Vietnam War and school busing.

Second, Ladd and Lipset found significant differences by discipline, type of school, and age of the professor. On discipline they found a “rather neat progression from the most left-of-center subject to the most conservative, running from the social sciences to the humanities, law and the fine arts, through the physical and biological sciences, education, and medicine, on to business, engineering, the smaller applied professional schools such as nursing and home economics, and finally agriculture, the most conservative discipline group.”²⁵ On type of school they found, as had Lazarsfeld, that professors tend to be further left the more professionally accomplished they are and the more elite the institutions where they work. On age their finding was that the youngest professors, products of the 1960s themselves, were the most left-leaning.

Third, Ladd and Lipset discovered that the relationship between views on national and campus politics was complex. All told, 57% of the faculty disapproved of student activism, while 43% approved. Faculty members with liberal politics were more likely to be in the approval camp, but few approved of activism “unreservedly.” As the authors explained, “Many left-of-center academics gave at best half-hearted support to student activism because they found in it a threat to the independence and atmosphere of open inquiry necessary to nurture the various strains of the scholarly pursuit.”²⁶

The Divided Academy (1975), the book that reported these results, was rightly viewed at the time as a perceptive work of social science. Like Lazarsfeld’s study, it marshaled high-quality quantitative data to validate for its day and age the “generalization” that “the political weight of American intellectuals, including leading academics, has been disproportionately on the progressive, liberal, and leftist side.”²⁷ Although not without its flaws, the book brought sober and dispassionate analysis to a topic easily given to polemic. Lipset, an extraordinarily wide-ranging scholar, also sought to link his research to an emerging theoretical and historical literature on intellectuals, class, and social change.

With Lazarsfeld’s and Ladd and Lipset’s studies completed, the seeds were sown for the blossoming of a rich and sophisticated research literature on professorial politics. But the flowers never appeared. While a number of theoretical treatises were produced in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, empirical work was slow to accumulate. The main reason was a lack of data. Researchers were forced to rely on three main data sources, all of them thin.

The first source was follow-up surveys to the 1969 Carnegie faculty survey. The 1975 Carnegie study contained a number of questions about politics, but in subsequent years the survey changed focus, becoming more concerned with academics’ work responsibilities and views of university governance. What remained of the politics questions was a single item that asked professors to locate themselves on a five-point scale running from left to liberal to middle of the road to moderately conservative to conservative, with the wording of the question changing slightly over the years. Researchers analyzed data from this question to determine whether, compared to 1969, the professoriate was growing more or less liberal or remaining about the same politically. Data from 1984 suggested a slight move to the right, but the overall shift from 1969 to 1997—the date of the most recent survey—was to the left, and this during a period that saw more of a gain in conservative than liberal self-identification in the country as a whole.²⁸ Between the two time points, the number of academics identifying as left/liberal increased by 8 percentage points, while the number of conservatives declined by 1 percentage point. Movement left was observed in nearly all fields, although the extent of the change varied. Education, the fine arts, the health sciences, and the humanities saw particularly large gains in the left/liberal ranks, but more modest changes in the same direction could also be found in the natural sciences, the social sciences, engineering, even business. Looking across all disciplines, in 1997 about 57% of professors described themselves as left or liberal, 20% called themselves moderate, and 24% were conservatives. These are significant findings and provide clear evidence in support of the claim that at the end of the twentieth century the professoriate remained a solidly liberal bloc. But because the Carnegie surveys contained no other po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Politics of American Professors
• 2. Why Are They Liberal? The Standard Explanations
• 3. Political Self-Selection and the Academic Profession
• 4. Political Differences among Professors
• 5. The Knowledge-Politics Problem
• 6. The Campaign against “Liberal Bias”
• 7. Why Conservatives Care
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index