In the most recent issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, an article "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?" by John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick purports to refute "right wing" claims about the ideological profile of professors, in particular work by George Mason economist Daniel Klein and coauthors. In an online interview, they accuse Klein and others of “cherry picking” the data. Klein and Charlotta Stern have written a full reply, which they have submitted to Public Opinion Quarterly.
Klein and Stern write:
[Zipp and Fenwick] attempt to allay concerns about the faculty ideological profile and trends with ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ statistics, without owning up to the nature and limitations of such data. They misrepresent our work in a number of ways. They also misrepresent other ‘right-wing’ research, notably Horowitz and Lehrer (2002). They construct a strawman to shift from Democrat:Republican in the humanities and social sciences to self-characterized Liberal:Conservative in the entire faculty, and then use empirics to attack the strawman. After refocusing the contention on all schools (even two-year colleges) and all departments, they never acknowledge the special importance of high-rank schools and of the humanities and social sciences. They omit mention of Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte (2005) and Klein and Stern (2005b), which shed light on their questions and which run counter to much of their analysis. In the end, the data that Zipp and Fenwick bring to the table in fact support our claims.
It will be interesting to see if the journal accepts Klein & Stern’s reply, but meanwhile readers judge for themselves.
Also of interest, if one takes Zipp and Fenwick's claims at face value, it means that elite universities are hiring conservatives at far lower rates than community colleges. This is inconsistent with claims by some that whatever the ratio of liberals to conservative in academia, that is merely a reflection of liberals being more interested in the field than conservatives. It could mean that conservative applicants for academic jobs are less well-qualified than liberal applicants, that conservative applicants face discrimination and thus their career prospects are limited, or that community colleges have a different mix of faculty than universities, and that such mixes are correlated with ideological differences. Note that none of the explanations are mutually inconsistent.
One interesting issue is whether "Democrat/Republican" is more informative regarding the ideological composition of faculty than "liberal/conservative." On the one hand, some overall "conservative" faculty, especially in the sciences, may register as Democrats because of their discomfort with the Republican's social and (perceived?) anti-scientific agenda. On the other hand, describing oneself as "moderate" or "conservative" is subjective and very much context-dependent; I've met many self-described "moderate" law professors whose views are moderate only compared to their colleagues, whose views are, in general American political terms, on the extreme left.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The (Politically) Divided Academy.--
- Ideology and the Academy--An Empirical Dispute:
sciences departments. I do not think that being
a true liberal is consistent with (a), (b) or (c),
and a new categorization of such radical beliefs
is required.
Can you explain why in the hard scientists and engineering, Democrats/liberals massively outnumber Republicans/conservatives by roughly the same margin as in the humanities? Is this yet another instance of liberal bias? Or might there be something else happening?
For all intents and purposes in most scientific type disciplines you might as well treat community college professors as a totally separate career than research professors at elite universities.
Historically, classical liberals have always been in favor of open borders, viewed as simply a form of free trade (free movement of labor rather than goods). It may be a matter of debate as to whether or not current events require this view among libertarians (if that is what sbron means by "a true liberal" who disagrees with (a), (b), and (c) ), but is unrebuttable that libertarians, who have never accepted multiculturalism and affirmative action, have always until recently accepted open borders.
Just because people are involved in the hard sciences and engineering does not mean that bias can automatically be ruled out. Engineers can discrimination on political affiliation as well as anyone, but one would assume it is much less prevalent. Of course, self-selection (which I assume you are alluding to since an intelligence gap between liberals and conservatives is highly unlikely) is definitely a factor.
One thing worthy of note is the geographical confinement of renowned universities in very liberal areas. This probably has a lot to do with the snow-ball effect of having a good reputation over the years. Note that many of the "best" universities are also some of the oldest. Harvard would have to try really hard to fall out of the top ten list.
Anyone who thinks liberals do not dominate universities is willfully blind.
The use of self-labeling to categorize faculty ideologies is fraught with problems, as anyone literate in this field knows. Zipp and Fenwick certainly should know how poorly self-labeling correlates with attitudes and behaviors, especially among left-liberals who often see themselves as mainstream moderates. They chose to ignore that so they could publish a worthless "study" designed to prove their pre-study bias that there is no ideologic favoritism in academia. What crap.
The rather large sample of law professors I've known doesn't fit this description at all. Many of them worked in Republican administrations. Many of them, and not the same ones, taught commercial subjects and held firmly mainstream views on economic policy. (The tax professors tended to favor low, relatively flat, broad-based taxes with as few deductions as politically feasible.) Many of them held lucrative consulting positions advising corporate America. Many of them were skeptical of, or downright hostile to, racial/gender preferences.
any of hem thought Roe v. Wade ill-advised or even illegitimate. Many of them became federal judges, appointed by Republican Presidents or confirmed by a Republican Senate. Many of them were prosecutors, some of them for a long time. I have no idea what most of them thought about immigration, but I have reason to believe many of them didn't care for it, unless they were in the market for a gardener.
To be sure, there were damn few creationists, Dominionists, natural lawyers, or libertarians, but only from such perspectives can the broad range of mainstream politics I predominantly saw in the legal academy be characterized as "far left." And my acquaintance isn't in the South Podunks of the legal academy, but in what is generally recognized as its elite fraction. Maybe it has changed since my day, but I'd be surprised.
Nor does it mean that you can whine about bias without hard facts to back up your claims. Success in the sciences is obtained by high-profile publications and large grants, both of which require an independent and sufficiently novel research program. We don't care about your views on foreign policy; we care about how much the NIH gave you and whether you've published in Science or Nature.
I actually work in the hard sciences at a famously left-wing university, and I can assure you that, at least from a grad student's perspective, political views are pretty much ignored as long as they remain irrelevant to our research, which is most of the time. The lone counterexample I know of here was when a left-wing professor claimed that he'd been denied tenure because his research (and personal views) conflicted with the financial interests of his department. In fact, the very close relationship between academia and industry (especially in my area) tends to promote a very pro-capitalism mindset. That doesn't mean that science professors are campaigning for deregulation and lower taxes (quite the opposite!), but they're certainly not waving Marx in our faces.
I suppose you could argue that the exclusion of creationism from scientific debate counts as bias, but creationism doesn't meet any standard of "science" that we're used to, and there are plenty of otherwise conservative, GOP-voting scientists (religious ones included) who will agree with me 100%.
Sure.
They aren't tenured and their survival is based on measurable performance.
"Sure. They aren't tenured and their survival is based on measurable performance."
Let's accept your explanation, which is evidently based on self-selection rather than bias. Why would that apply only to conservatives? (And let's remember that entry-level professors are not hired with tenure, and that in many fields they fail to achieve it.)
I recall a survey from a year or so ago where approximately 50% of high-school seniors thought the government should actively censor the press, so I'm not sure that it's fair to compare a professional legal scholar to the public in general. I suspect that actively studying legal issues will naturally result in a much different perspective from the rest of the country. Not necessarily more liberal, just different.
However, if we're going to cherry-pick, I'd like to point out that John Yoo teaches law about 200 meters from where I'm sitting now. That man has done more damage to our system of government and our national reputation than all of the other law professors in this country combined. He clerked for Thomas, so it's not like his political orientation was a mystery to the Boalt faculty when they hired him. I don't think it's unfair to characterize Yoo as being on the extreme right, at least as far as constitutional law is concerned. But I'm just a scientist, so I could be way off base here.
Note: No one claimed that the fact that there are more democrats/liberals in the hard sciences means anything... we understand that the field is more objective and political views mean little or nothing. Gues Account was just looking for an explaination for an interesting data point.
Oh yeah... and the football coach line of comments was tongue-in-cheek, people.
- make up about 2% of the population, but
- make up 40-50% of law professors at leading law schools, and make up a massively disproportionate percentage of the science, engineering, etc. professors too
- voted 87% for the Democratic party in the 2006 midterms (see CNN exit polls)
The reasons for the exceptional success of Jewish people are ambiguous, and the reasons for the massive support of Jews for the Democratic Party are also ambiguous, but whatever the reasons for these trends, this contributes to the liberal professoriat.
Given the data on charitable giving by ideology this is not at all clear. (Though this is certainly contenious.) Liberals often seem to be more keen to coerce others into sacrificing to improve society.
- In the hard sciences, roughly 2/3 of electrical engineering Ph.D. students in American universities in a given year are from foreign countries. That's not a typo. I believe that over half of physics and Mech E Ph. D. students are foreign. Many of them stay and become professors. Essentially all of these people will vote for the Democratic Party.
- Law faculties have also made an effort to hire African Americans proportionate to their representation in the population, so every law school has several African Americans. Almost all of them vote Democratic.
This relatively liberal law student needs to get back to writing a paper about how the BLM's new grazing regulations don't violate the endangered species act.
-Ty
I had a dream. I dreamt that the American legal academy would judge me on my ability to teach and to write and to serve, not on my conformity to someone else's image of a good colored boy. When I sought a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, my dream exploded.
Alone among the schools that interviewed me, Boalt Hall scheduled a meeting between me and the school's Asian American law students' association. The school never sought my consent. Nor did it attempt to counteract the students' overt insinuation that they enjoyed the power to veto any unacceptable faculty candidate. Many of these students made several points quite clear. Apparently failing to appreciate how their actions might persuade the dominant white majority that minority professors cannot flourish but for whites' noblesse oblige, they regarded law faculty positions as commodities too scarce to be allocated to Asian American candidates who would not serve as satisfactory role models. These students viewed with grave suspicion my scholarly record and preferred teaching assignments, both dominated by subjects that they did not regard to be of interest to the Asian American legal community. They asked whether I would be willing to serve as faculty advisor to the Asian Law Journal, a publication devoted to civil rights issues. At a law school where numerous faculty members would be better qualified to advise such a journal than an entry-level professor of agricultural law, legislation, and regulated industries, the very existence of this inquiry suggested that the students valued an advisor's ethnicity more than his or her legal expertise. Finally, when they asked me to prove my "authenticity" as an Asian American, I had no doubt that these students would scrutinize my political beliefs in judging my suitability as a faculty member. I realized that no mountain of gold, no purchase of academic prestige could serve as adequate wages for the bitter labor I would be asked to perform.
Chen subsequently withdrew from his candidacy.
Here's an alternate explanation: conservatism by its nature isn't really a philosophy meant for self-doubt and constant re-examination. Liberalism, on the other hand, should be, even if most self-proclaimed liberals don't spend much time thinking about their beliefs. Nonetheless, the hard sciences require working with incomplete evidence and constantly questioning assumptions, and we can't predict what new discoveries will dramatically change our field. Conservatism (in the dictionary sense, not political) is terrible for science, and people with a conservative mindset may not be attracted to such a field. In contrast, I've seen claims that engineering tends to be a more conservative field than basic research, which makes total sense to me. I don't think money has anything to do with that, either.
Note that I'm not claiming that liberals are somehow smarter or better - I'm just fishing for ideas. I'm not sure my theory holds up, because the vast majority of my colleagues, liberal or conservative, do not appear to have ever questioned or re-examined their political views anyway, and so their mindsets aren't really all that different. The same goes for the American public in general.
I, on the other hand, enjoy being proven wrong, whether in politics or in science, and the latter has certainly been happening quite regularly.
Thomas Sowell has spent a lot of time explaining how differential representation, such as by race, is not necessarily evidence of any bias. The same conclusion should be true here.
There are externality costs, though, to such self-selection. I personally find them a basis for affirmative action on behalf of underrepresented groups, including conservatives, though only at the margin.
I'm not here to defend Boalt, but I can't muster too much sympathy for this guy. The students are the customers who pay the bills, including the tuition of law professors, so why shouldn't they have some say in how the law school operates? Even as a state university like Boalt, tuition still accounts for a pretty good chunk of the funding.
As a faculty, one might conclude that no student involvement at all will produce a better quality law school, and you can take your chances in the marketplace as you try to attract the best students you can. Nothing wrong with that. But if a school decides on a different approach and wants to have some kind of student involvement, then that's a legitimate approach too and candidates don't have much ground to complain.
As for scheduling him for a meeting with the Asian law students association, that does seem a bit insulting to me, or it would if I were the candidate. One would hope that this isn't a process applied only to "ethnic" candidates.
Um, what do the students know? This is akin to Gallaudet's students "vetoing" their president based on the fact she has the misfortunate of not being totally deaf. Do the students know anything about agricultural law? What would they know to look for? How do they weigh the long term needs of the school?
Additionally, this isn't "student involvement." This is "student political organization with a singular agenda" involvement. So there's no reason to think they speak for all of the school, or even most of it.
Like professor Volokh, no doubt!
The national origin of professors might have some effect on the political views in science and engineering departments, but "essentually all" is too over-the-top.
For serious, self-selection isn't just a bias, it's a tool that helps correct these biases. Want a conservative school? Go to University of Chicago. Or George Mason. I hear their profile is rising exactly because self-selection is a fine remedy to pervasive bias. So is Fox News. As the market responds to measurable shift in preferences and ideas, the tide will turn.
On the other hand, when "liberals" and "conservatives" are viewed as evolving coalitions of political constituencies and interest groups, their shifting, internally inconsistent positions make perfect sense. This approach also explains the predominance of liberals in academia. After all, academics are just another constituency, with its own interests and allegiances--why wouldn't they line up disproportionately on one side of the aisle?
Part of this, IMHO, is that much of liberalism is based on a utopian view of society. Government and society are prefectable, if we just try hard enough. Failures can invariably be attributed to not having smart enough people running things. Obviously, this is another reason why the academy, esp. at the elite levels is so liberal - they believe that they are the ones who are smart enough to design (and rule) such a utopian society.
From a conservatives point of view, the problem here is simply that government cannot effectively or effiicently do what many want it do to, through innate structural problems with it, ranging from loss of focus, agency capture, that those being regulated, etc. invariably are smarter (in the aggregate) than those doing the regulating, and that policians get themselves reelected by spending the citizens' money to buy their votes from them. This dynamic of seeing the impracticality of utopian solutions is why the Neocons moved from being progressives to neocons, and that Churchill made that famous statement that "Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain"
First, they select only a small number of departments to study. It is hard to escape the suspicion that the selection was intended to exaggerate their claims.
Second, they select only 32 schools, many of them quite small (Oberlin, Haverford, Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, et al). The only large state university on the list is Berkeley.
Third, there is another huge selection bias built into their choice of schools. Almost all are in heavily Democratic regions. One quarter are in Massachusetts. This in itself makes it likely that the faculty will be Democratic, and it also suggests that many moderate or mildly conservative faculty members will register as Democrats, because the Democratic primary will often be a much more important contest than the Republican.
Fourth, they mention only in passing that they found more unaffiliated faculty (1891) than Democrats and Republicans combined.
So looking at carefully selected departments, in a non-representative sample of schools, located in heavily Democratic regions, they find that, among the minority of faculty who have a party registration, a preponderance are Democrats. From this they generalize wildly that, among other things:
These figures suggest that most students probably graduate without ever having a class taught by a professor with a conservative viewpoint. The ratios themselves are impossible to understand in the absence of a political bias in the training and hiring of college instructors. They strongly suggest that the governance of American universities has fallen into the hands of a self-perpetuating political and cultural subset of the general population, which seems intent on perpetuating its control.
The Horowitz and Lehrer analysis is a bad joke. Is it any wonder that this work found its home on FrontPage magazine.com? No one citing it as a meaningful piece of research deserves to be taken seriously.
Most hiring at serious universities is done in a national market these days, so the political composition of the faculty is often not related to that of the place where the school is located. One needn't go to "heavily Democratic regions" to find heavily left-wing faculties. Consider, for example, the flagship state universities in states like Utah, Colorado, and Montana, where the faculties are far to the left of the local population.
The fact that it's almost impossible to find faculties to the right of the local population is pretty good evidence that some sort of political selection (self, by employers, or both) is going on in the hiring and promotion process.