A Conservative Professor On Academe’s Political Conformity

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  A Conservative Professor on Academe’s Political Conformity, by Mark Moyar (Hillsdale):

Last year I visited Harvard at the invitation of two organizations in whose services I had labored as a student 30 years earlier: the Republican Club and the undergraduate conservative magazine The Harvard Salient. The Salient had recently adopted a policy of publishing articles under pseudonyms because of fears that naming the authors would result in damage to their grades, social lives, and careers. Those fears were validated by a report of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which rated Harvard lower on free speech than the organization had ever rated any American university before.

I had not returned to Harvard since serving as a senior political appointee in the Trump administration. As my Uber approached, I wondered whether I would have to dash through a gantlet of organic tomatoes. In 2021 more than 200 members of the Harvard community signed a petition demanding that the university “refuse to serve as a tool to launder the reputations” of any Republicans who had “crafted and enabled the Trump administration’s anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, racist, and morally reprehensible abuses.” Harvard’s president at the time, Lawrence S. Bacow, then poured fuel on the fire by removing the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik from a Harvard committee because she had raised questions about the proprieties of the 2020 presidential election. As Stefanik would later point out in her grilling of Bacow’s successor, Claudine Gay, Harvard’s handling of controversial speech seemed to reflect a double standard. The university made no effort to punish any students or faculty members who appeared to endorse Hamas’s genocidal attack on 10/7.

In fact, no mobs materialized to bar my path. No leftists showed up to jeer my remarks on the finer points of history and politics. My hosts explained that the opposing side never showed up to hear conservative speakers. Prior interactions had led the young rightists to conclude that their left-leaning counterparts were so certain of their rectitude that they had no interest in contrary viewpoints. The Harvard conservatives also acknowledged, ruefully, that conservative students responded to this treatment by tuning liberal students out. No one was listening to, or conversing with, the other side. Surely the herd instincts and general overconfidence of the human species are in part to blame for this sad state of affairs. So is the media segregation that allows individuals to avoid contact with contrary viewpoints, and the coddling of youth by elite parents and culture. But colleges themselves deserve much of the blame. ...

When I began applying for tenure-track professorships, in 2002, I had little doubt that search committees would discern my conservative leanings from my writings and affiliations, but I hoped that some would find my qualifications and publications compelling enough to hire me. The presence of one conservative in a department of 20 or 30 scholars would hardly tilt the ideological balance, and it would enhance “diversity” — a term to which university dons were now paying daily homage. If Harvard could hire conservatives like Harvey Mansfield and James Hankins, then surely other schools would be open to hiring a token conservative. ...

As it turned out, the faculties at nearly all of the places I applied were distinctly uninterested in hiring conservatives. The generation that had hired Harvey Mansfield was now gone from academe. In its place were left-wing boomers and their protégés in Generation X, many of whom were even more fanatical than the boomers in their insistence on filtering out job applicants who were not left of center. In the course of applying for more than 200 jobs, I routinely lost out to less-qualified candidates. After seven years of futility, I gave up and moved into the worlds of think tanks and government service. (I joined the faculty at Hillsdale College in 2021, after an 11-year hiatus.)

In future jobs and experiences, I never came across liberal scholars with brilliant minds and top-tier doctorates who had struggled to find academic jobs, but I found plenty of conservative scholars who met that description. ...

The dwindling of the conservative professoriate has contributed to a decline in the number of conservatives pursuing graduate degrees. So has the perception that discrimination against conservatives is rampant in academic hiring. Those mutually reinforcing maladies portend a continued worsening of the gross political imbalance among American colleges’ faculties. ...

The left’s success in excluding conservatives from the faculty has had one positive side effect: Smart donors, parents, and students have stopped patronizing the colleges and universities of the academic Broadway and taken their money to off-Broadway institutions. At such private institutions as Hillsdale College (my employer), the University of Dallas, Pepperdine University, Grove City College, Baylor University, and Liberty University, professors who failed political litmus tests are now cultivating political and cultural leaders of the future by teaching them the central features of Western history, literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. Moreover, conservative legislators in states like Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona have begun circumventing the campus totalitarians at public institutions by creating new academic centers that welcome faculty members and students who do not accept the prevailing leftist dogmas. ...

The appointment of the conservative legal scholar John Manning as Harvard’s interim provost indicates a recognition that some ideological diversity is necessary. In April the administration announced the formation of an “Open Inquiry Working Group,” owing to the fact that “many in our community feel constrained in their ability to express their views on critically important questions.” Whether this working group will achieve something of significance, or merely serve as another sop to donors, remains to be seen. My offer of assistance has been sitting in the email boxes of the committee chairs for several months without reply.

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