Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?, by Steven M. Teles (Johns Hopkins; Google Scholar; Author, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton University Press)):

More conspicuously than at any time in living memory, elite higher education has found itself in the political crosshairs. While the Hamas attack on Israel — and the inept response of university leaders — lit the fire, the dry tinder for a political assault on our most prestigious universities has been sitting around for some time.

Those who sense more than a whiff of political opportunism and anti-intellectualism in this assault are not mistaken. But the public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed-minded is undeniably correct. Indeed, concerns about the ideological drift of the university are no longer limited to conservatives, but now include some left-leaning faculty who worry that higher education has become, in the words of Gregory Conti, a political philosopher at Princeton, “sectarian.”

This mounting sectarianism manifests itself in various aspects of the university, including the scope of debate within and outside the classroom, the growth of campus administration, and the tenor of student life. For a professor like myself, the character of the professoriate is the most salient aspect of the change. And where conservative faculty are concerned, the facts are beyond dispute: Their numbers are low and continue to fall.

Jon A. Shields, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, has summarized the basic trend, finding that outside of economics, the percentages of conservatives in the social-science and humanities disciplines have dropped to the single digits. In my own field of political science, Pippa Norris of Harvard University’s Kennedy School has found that the cohort born in 1990 (the newly minted full professors of today) is considerably further to the left than those born in 1960 (those approaching retirement). This means that a further drift leftward among the professoriate is already baked in. At my own university, Johns Hopkins, I would be hard-pressed to name a single tenured professor in the social sciences and humanities who is openly right of center in any reasonable understanding of the term.

The university’s ideological narrowing has advanced so far that even liberal institutionalists — faculty who believe universities should be places of intellectual pluralism and adhere to the traditional academic norms of merit and free inquiry — are in decline. While we do not have good data on the rising cohort of graduate students, I have talked to faculty at several institutions who report that with each passing year, every class of admitted graduate students is further to the left of, and displays a more activist orientation toward scholarship than, the class preceding it. And, of course, the graduate students of today are the junior faculty of tomorrow.

How could this have come to be? And what can be done about it? ...

There are no shortcuts for bringing conservatives back into the mainstream of academic life; that project will require the slow, uncertain, arduous work of rebuilding the pathways by which they enter into the core disciplines of the university. Liberal institutionalists in academe who believe in the university as a place of intellectual pluralism have an obligation to help rebuild those pathways and find a place for conservatives in their institutions.

We cannot do that critical inside work, however, if we find ourselves excluded as well. In institution after institution in American life, what begins with the exclusion of conservatives eventually ends up as a threat to liberals or those with a less politicized notion of their vocation. Former New York Times editor James Bennet has written eloquently about how liberal institutionalists have found it increasingly difficult to maintain their positions in places like the Times. There is every reason to believe that the structural processes I have described may already be leading to self-exclusion by those who identify with neither the right nor the insurgent left.

In some ways, the problem is even worse for liberal institutionalists than it is for those on the right. Conservatives have organizations that can facilitate collective action and mutual support. We the non-aligned barely have a name to call ourselves, much less a way to organize and promote our interests in places like universities. What’s more, liberal institutionalists tend to have an atomistic sense of the academic vocation, believing that uniting to defend “our” interests is inconsistent with the individualistic character of scholarship. This means they are in a poor position to organize for self-defense.

Yet organize we must. And conservatives should see our defense of academic liberalism as a necessary precondition for their success in finding a place for responsible conservatism in academe.

Update:  Peter Berkowitz (Hoover Institution), Roots of and Remedies to America’s Illiberal Education

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