Academia has long been left-leaning
In my first post about illiberalism, I mentioned a college president’s letter defending her school. Parents had been complaining that the college was brainwashing students with its leftist ideas, but the president insisted that intellectual liberalism flourished there—that students were exposed to a diversity of thought.
It might not surprise you to hear that the school in question was my own alma mater. (Why else would I be reading a letter from a college president? 🙂 ) Whitman is a small school in the beautiful wheat and wine country of Walla Walla, Washington. It’s fairly typical of liberal arts colleges: expensive, fun, supportive, earnest…and politically liberal.
For all its flaws, Whitman is a magical place, and I’m proud to have gone there. All schools have flaws, but I chose this one for its friendliness, natural beauty, and thoughtful students and staff. Whitman had a supremely positive impact on my life.
But when I went there, in the late nineties, I recognized that certain things were missing from my education. Most of my professors and peers looked and thought a lot like me. Few were from working-class families or communities of color. Also, few were conservative.
I majored in environmental studies with an emphasis on politics. Many of my classes focused on international development, with a heavy critique of neoliberal agencies like the World Bank. Most, or perhaps all, of my professors were politically liberal, as were the vast majority of my classmates.
One professor made a point of being contrarian, which I came to appreciate. I still remember several moments when he was the lone advocate of conservative stances. I doubt he leaned right himself, but he clearly hoped to prod my classmates and me into more rigorous thought.
Each time he did it, it felt like a breath of fresh air I hadn’t known I needed.
In one class, a lively discussion landed on a sweeping condemnation of science. Someone pointed out that science had been developed in Europe, by men with a Eurocentric worldview. Someone else added that science is often funded by industry, which always has an agenda. Pretty soon, the class had agreed that scientists could be terribly biased, and that science was therefore generally biased, and untrustworthy.
“Now, wait a minute,” interjected this professor. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole point of science to remove human bias? Isn’t that what makes science science—the ability for diverse people to repeat experiments and validate or invalidate them objectively?”
His comment made us pause, and it generated a far more rigorous discussion. The problem of bias in science is real, but it’s not the whole story about science. Had he not spoken up, we might have gotten away with our lazy, blanket judgment.
Science gets questioned by people from both sides of the left-right political spectrum, although in recent years, the distrust of science and expertise has grown stronger on the right. But my anecdote illustrates the problem that occurs when a group has too many like-minded people, regardless of their politics. Since so many of us had similar views, we as a group often had enormous blind spots.
That class was in 1999. And research shows that homogeneity of viewpoints in academia has only gotten worse since then.
The conservative exodus
Academia has become far more politically liberal over the last few decades. In 1969, around one in four university faculty members was conservative, whereas in recent decades, that number has dropped to about one in eight.
In many schools and disciplines, it’s far fewer. According to a fascinating 2018 article in National Affairs:
[B]ecause conservatives tend to cluster in certain kinds of institutions…many of America’s best colleges and universities have become one-party campuses. This problem is especially acute on the campuses of elite liberal-arts colleges. According to a recent study on faculty party affiliation by the National Association of Scholars, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans at Williams College is 132:1; at Swarthmore it is 120:1; and at Bryn Mawr it is 72:0. At many of America’s best research universities, the ratios are only moderately better.
When I describe this trend to my fellow progressives, I often get the same question. Isn’t it possible that conservatism simply correlates with a lack of education? When a person becomes more educated and thus exposed to more facts, isn’t it natural for them also to become more liberal, because they realize the ignorance of conservative views? Shouldn’t we therefore be unsurprised to see very few highly educated conservatives?
But this question belies an unconscious bias. Yes, the Republican Party has often departed from facts in recent years, especially in the post-truth era of Trump. But conservatism doesn’t equal Republicanism or Trumpism.
Throughout history, there’ve been many conservative intellectual giants, from Cicero to Edmund Burke to Thomas Sowell. These great minds were (or are) highly educated, with a firm grasp on facts, history, and philosophy—but with a conservative worldview.
(Interesting side note: a 2014 study found that libertarians, on average, have a slightly higher IQ than either liberals or social conservatives. Liberals, in turn, have a higher average IQ than social conservatives—but these differences are all small.)
So this isn’t just a matter of education “correcting” people’s worldview until they become liberal. There must be another explanation for why conservatives, including libertarians, are recently avoiding academia far more than they used to.
In recent years, conservative faculty and students report an increasingly hostile, illiberal atmosphere at universities, driven by political polarization and the left’s cancel culture. Campus conservatives’ ideas are openly denigrated by students and colleagues. They often encounter microaggressions, and professors’ prospects for receiving tenure are sometimes threatened when their conservatism becomes known. As a result, many remain closeted, afraid to reveal their political beliefs.
This increasingly hostile atmosphere has made it unappealing for many conservatives to stay in academia, or to enter it in the first place.
Why we need conservatives in academia
Learning about the conservative exodus has helped me understand why science and expertise have become so mistrusted on the political right.
Certainly, misinformation from right-wing politicians, pundits, and conspiracy theorists is partly to blame. But also, if all the climate scientists and public health officials graduated from places where conservatives and their ideas aren’t even welcome, then why should conservatives trust science and expertise?
I think it’s no wonder so many right-leaning people have trouble discerning between politicians’ and pundits’ falsehoods and the scientific truth. We’re excluding them from the places that are supposed to be bastions of truth, and training grounds for critical thinking.
The pandemic especially illustrates why conservative mistrust of science is so disastrous: we need everyone on board with vaccines and mask mandates, not just liberals. Academia’s illiberalism isn’t the only reason for conservative mistrust, but it’s likely one of the reasons.
And academic illiberalism doesn’t just foster conservative mistrust in expertise. It also diminishes the quality of that expertise.
Science relies heavily on peer review and critical thinking—researchers must present their projects to others who can poke holes in their arguments. But confirmation bias makes it hard to see our own blind spots and to question views that agree with our own.
The best way to arrive at the truth is to expose our ideas to people who think differently from us. The more homogenous researchers are, the more they’ll miss each other’s thinking errors, just like my classmates and I missed our own errors in our discussion of science. Only with a variety of perspectives will research be exposed to a full range of possible critiques and thus held to the highest standard.
Efforts to restore intellectual liberalism
In response to campus illiberalism, a series of intriguing institutions have been springing up to support conservatives and intellectual liberalism in academia.
For instance, the nonprofit Intercollegiate Studies Institute aims to support “communities of thoughtful conservatives.” First led by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ISI has societies in dozens of cities and campuses around the country. This is an older example, but many others are more recent. This past week, the proposed University of Austin has been making news with its “anti-cancel culture” mission.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has written books about polarization and campus free speech, is involved in a related effort called the Heterodox Academy, a nationwide group whose mission is
To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.
(Just as orthodoxy is a synonym for illiberalism, heterodoxy is a synonym for intellectual liberalism.)
The group currently includes over five thousand professors, administrators, staff, and students from around the country. Among other endeavors, they help advocate for their fellow academics who’ve been threatened with “cancelation” for defensible ideas.
A breath of fresh air
Looking into the ISI and other related organizations as I researched this post, I must say I felt that same breath of fresh air I felt so many years ago when my contrarian professor spoke.
Even though I’m progressive on most issues, I find it invigorating to encounter thoughtful, well-argued challenges to my beliefs. Being challenged gets me out of simplistic thinking, and it’s stimulating and fun to be forced to really think. (I’ve enjoyed perusing the ISI’s archive of lectures and debates.)
Even as a young college student, I felt a subtle unease with my lopsided education and a yearning to be challenged more thoroughly. I might have benefitted from seeking out the few campus conservatives for discussions—but I don’t think I even knew who they were, or how to find them.
In the years since, I’ve been making up for what was missing back then. I’ve reached out to conservatives and co-founded Reach Out Wisconsin. But it shouldn’t take this much effort to educate yourself!
So I applaud the movement to support intellectual liberalism on campuses. If we want American education to be rigorous, and want Americans to generally value science and expertise, we need to make academia a place where conservatives feel more welcome.
