Chronicle: Conservatives Are Rare In Academe. Does It Matter?

Chronicle of Higher Education, The Professoriate's Political Problem:

Conservatives Are Rare in Academe. Does It Matter?

In a recent essay in The Chronicle [Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?], the Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles asserted that “the public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed-minded is undeniably correct.” He pointed to the declining presence of conservatives on academic faculties and in graduate cohorts, arguing that it poses an acute problem for how academe functions and is a serious drag on how higher education is perceived.

Teles’s essay tapped into a long-brewing debate about political diversity and the professoriate. It also elicited a large and varied response from readers. To continue this complicated and contentious discussion, we asked a group of academics to weigh in. Among the questions we posed:

• What has led to the underrepresentation of conservatives in academe?
• What, if any, concrete steps ought to be taken by colleges to redress the imbalance of political representation?
• What role, if any, should non-conservatives play in the defense and preservation of conservative viewpoints in academe?

Here’s what they told us. ...

Brian Leiter (Chicago), Scholarship, Not Partisanship:

That someone is a “conservative” is as relevant to a faculty appointment as the fact that they prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, or rock climbing to chess. Political tastes deserve as much consideration as other personal characteristics when it comes to hiring scholars, which is to say, they deserve none. (Indeed, to consider political tastes at all is illegal at public universities, one of the problems with “diversity” statements.) I’ll return, below, to the possible exceptions to the preceding, but the rule is clear enough.

• Musa al-Gharbi (Stony Brook), The University Has Never Been Woke
• Gregory Conti (Princeton), Total Institutions
• Elizabeth Corey (Baylor), Education Is an Intrinsic Good
• Tyler Austin Harper (Bates), Academe Is Conservative, Even if Academics Aren’t 
• Zena Hitz (St. John's), A University That Looks and Thinks Like Humanity
• Mark Lilla (Columbia), Questioning Pieties
• Roosevelt Montás (Columbia), Campuses Are Prone to Extremes
• Julie A. Reuben (Harvard), Neutrality Is a Myth
• Jon A. Shields (Claremont McKenna), How Universities Die
• Ruth R. Wisse (Harvard), Universities Must Excise What Ruined Them

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