A Conservative Professor on Academe’s Political Conformity

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.

In times past, Harvard undergraduates all took the same courses in Western civilization and American history. They absorbed common course material like the Nicomachean Ethics and the Federalist Papers, which they discussed together. But in the second half of the 20th century, Harvard and most of the nation’s other colleges and universities cut those weighty anchors away.

Today’s Harvard students are required to take no specific courses. They are united only by shared belief in their pre-existing virtue and in an awareness of which opinions are career-enhancing and which are career-destroying. In the absence of knowledge about the United States, Western civilization, or Christianity, students can form whatever opinions about those subjects suit their prejudices.

Thirty years ago, conservatives thought that the campus was already in an advanced state of decline. In hindsight, however, Harvard was in much better shape then than it is now. The senior faculty members at that time had a genuine interest in the general education of the undergraduate student body, along with a tolerance for political and cultural ideas other than their own.

By the early 1990s, mandatory courses in Western civilization and American history had already been dropped, but professors still offered broad surveys in those subjects that satisfied general-education requirements. Although a large majority of the faculty leaned left, students could take courses from a variety of professors on the right, such as Harvey Mansfield, James Hankins, Stephen Peter Rosen, and Stephan Thernstrom.

The seeds of our current morass were, nevertheless, already being sown. At this point, boomers in their 40s were starting to become full professors and senior news editors. In their evolution from college students denouncing the American “system” to high-salaried elites controlling that same system, the boomers had become more refined and subtle in their conduct, but they had lost neither their supreme confidence in their own goodness nor their intolerance of dissent.

Some conservative students were brave enough — or foolhardy enough, depending on whom you asked — to express their views openly, but others kept quiet. Students quickly figured out that expressing conservative opinions would ensure they would never teach at Harvard or work for NBC News. Hillsdale College and Fox News had not yet burst onto the scene as alternatives, so nearly all conservatives planned for employment in fields like business, law, and medicine, where our opportunities would not be circumscribed by imperious intellectuals of the left.

Like many of my fellow conservatives, I began my career in the business world. But I couldn’t take the tedium or the questionable ethics of some business elites, so I went to graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in history at the dawn of the 21st century. By the time I finished, the activists of the boomer generation were largely in control of colleges, media conglomerates, tech giants, and other repositories of elite culture.

With their predecessors out of the way, the elite boomers lost whatever qualms they might have had about hurling epithets at dissenters and depriving them of employment. Opponents of illegal immigration and sanctuary cities were racists and fascists. Opponents of high taxes and lifetime welfare were racists and exploiters. Proponents of traditional definitions of marriage and gender were hate-filled homophobes. Americans who favored using the U.S. military to protect American national interests abroad were fascists and militarists. Although not every boomer pushed an ideological agenda in the classroom, surveys of students would consistently show the pervasiveness of pressure for ideological conformity.

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. Some of these conservative scholars became senior government officials, like Ben Sasse, Nadia Schadlow, Victoria Coates, Thomas Williams, Eric Edelman, Joe Felter, and Bill Steiger. Others occupied prominent positions at conservative think tanks, including H.R. McMaster, Richard Weitz, Gary Schmitt, Jonathan Schanzer, Zack Cooper, Ted Bromund, Kori Schake, David Adesnik, Megan Reiss, Jim Carafano, and Nile Gardiner. A smaller group of conservative scholars obtained entry-level professorships but then were denied tenure after their rightist political views came to light, and hence had to flee to government or think-tank jobs, such as Jakub Grygiel, Austin Long, Tom Karako, Peter Berkowitz, and Michael Doran.

Most of the talented conservative scholars ultimately obtained jobs that allowed them to influence government policy or publish extensively. But their jobs didn’t allow them to influence the undergraduates who would become the leaders of the next generation, or the graduate students who would become the educators of the next generation. Because they lacked professorships at prestigious universities, they could not connect easily to the governing elite and the media, as the likes of Harvey Mansfield, Henry Kissinger, and Thomas Sowell had been able to do in decades past.

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 disappearance of conservatives from doctoral programs has, in addition, put the right at a numerical disadvantage in producing policy experts and research. Expertise is hardly a political panacea; presumptuous experts can often cause more harm than good. Nonetheless, politicians and political appointees need expert knowledge in all sorts of fields. Trade policy, for example, is unlikely to be improved if the political authorities cannot consult people who have studied the topic for decades. And the lack of conservative perspectives at graduate schools has allowed the left to indulge in the sloppy thinking of an echo chamber.

Matters would be even worse for the conservative cause were it not for the fact that nearly all of the academic left has lost sight of real policy issues. Historians, for example, have abandoned policy-relevant fields like political, diplomatic, military, and economic history in favor of race, class, and gender studies. During my time as a senior Trump-administration official, I visited the huge annual conference of the International Studies Association to see if I could learn something of value to my job. Perhaps 1 percent of the presentations offered anything of relevance to the actual business of government.

At the time of my futile flailing in the academic job market, two decades ago, most conservative Americans found the politicization of higher education objectionable, but paid little attention to the few of us who were sounding the alarm. They, along with millions of other Americans, assumed that the poisonous effects of faculty radicalization would remain confined to the campus. They would have cause to regret their indifference in the years ahead, when the doctrines of the academic left took hold far beyond faculty clubs and student social-justice centers.

Another group that should have cared more than it did was the faculty of the moderate left. Although some liberal professors did not share the obsession of their radical colleagues with excluding different viewpoints, very few of them would lift a finger to help conservatives get faculty appointments. They were paralyzed by disdain for conservatives, fear of retribution by the totalitarians of the far left, or both. They would later rue their inaction in the face of radical intolerance, when that intolerance was redirected at them. “Until the conservatives were gone,” one liberal academic told Megan McArdle of The Washington Post in 2021, “I hadn’t realized how much they were serving as our human shields.”

In recent years, the faculty pressures for ideological conformity have become so suffocating that select liberals within academe have been willing to speak up. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and a veteran of the Obama administration, acknowledged that students in general are “less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.” Sunstein concluded that “those who run departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to find people who will represent competing views — visiting speakers, visiting professors, and new hires.” But not even with the imprimatur of someone like Sunstein has this logic been able to unbolt the gates that keep conservatives out of academe’s pastures.

The left’s purging of the right from higher education attained all of its objectives, except the one toward which all others were driving — the transformation of American culture and politics. The campaigners hoped that eradicating conservatives from the universities, as well as the media, would enable them to remake all of America in the image of a leftist college town. By depriving the American masses of access to conservative thinking on topics like the Constitution, the nuclear family, religion, personal responsibility, capitalism, and sex differences, they sought to leave the masses no choice but to follow the leftward ideological path laid out before them.

As it has turned out, the American people aren’t that gullible. Although the left’s domination of academe and the media has permitted radical changes in several key sectors of American society — such as marriage, gender, immigration, and the ideology of diversity — it hasn’t induced a mass migration from right to left. Leftist excesses, indeed, have pushed substantial elements of the country rightward. Close to half of American voters have recognized that the intelligentsia is trying to sell them political ideas incompatible with their everyday experiences, traditions, religious beliefs, and common sense, and so they keep voting into office the members of a Republican Party that, by and large, remains a party of the right.

The radicalization of the left has also led to unsettling changes in the leadership, culture, and methodology of the right. By embedding close-mindedness and condescension in the nation’s most influential academic and media institutions, the boomers marginalized highly educated moderates and conservatives who could have emerged as leading voices of the right. They further undermined the right’s sharpest minds by diminishing the value of higher education and prestigious degrees in the eyes of much of the electorate. Elements of the right decided to fight the left’s fire with fire, counterattacking with the same close-mindedness and condescension.

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.

Donors, parents, and students are aware that the glitz and cachet of the elite old-guard institutions confer important advantages on graduates, but they are increasingly willing to forgo those advantages. The pros of the big-name schools are outweighed by the cons of radical faculty members, anti-Western curricula, administrative bloat, overreaching diversity bureaucracies, exorbitant tuition — and employer perceptions that graduates are less capable and more self-important than in the past. The Republican Party’s mounting suspicion of the Ivy League and other elite universities means that it is increasingly reliant on students from other institutions to govern.

From my perch in rural south-central Michigan, I can attest that much valuable teaching and research take place away from the academic Broadway. Here the students do not live in mortal fear of expressing the wrong opinions. They learn more about their civilization than their self-esteem. Some of them will go on to high positions in government, law, business, the arts, and the sciences, where their impact will ultimately depend not on the name of the college where they studied but the content of the education they received.

During my visit to Harvard last year, conservative students repeatedly asked me whether I thought a conservative presence could be restored at the university. At this point, nearly five years had elapsed since Sunstein’s admonition, and Harvard had done nothing to redress left-wing radicalization of its departments. Harvey Mansfield was preparing to retire, which would bring the number of conservative professors in the humanities and social sciences close to zero. Believing it my duty to provide the unvarnished truth, I replied that I could not see it happening in my lifetime. The boomers had succeeded in hiring professors from Generation X who shared their commitment to excluding the right. No state legislature can compel Harvard to create a department for conservatives, and no wealthy conservative donor has been able to do it.

I could, of course, be wrong. Perhaps new radical excesses will convert enough liberals to Sunstein’s view that ideological conformity is a blight on the university. Or perhaps debacles like the presidency of Claudine Gay will persuade a critical mass of donors to coerce the institution into hiring conservatives.

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.