A Professor Said Liberals on the Faculty Aren’t as Big a Worry as Those in the Administration. That’s When His Troubles Started.

Courtesy of Samuel Abrams

Conservative critics of the perceived liberal orthodoxy in higher education often focus on the politics of professors and students. The real issue, says Samuel Abrams, might be administrators.

“Student-facing” administrators at colleges are significantly more liberal than professors, reports Abrams, a conservative-leaning professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College. His finding is based on a survey sent to 9,400 administrators, about 900 of whom responded. He wrote a piece for The New York Times, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators,” about the need for ideological balance among college administrators and the programming they offer to students.

His work was not a polemic, Abrams reasoned. It was an ambitious undertaking involving graduate and undergraduate researchers’ querying administrators from every type of higher-education institution, including research universities, liberal-arts colleges, elite private colleges, and community colleges.

While he named specific programs at Sarah Lawrence, with titles like “Understanding White Privilege” and “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” the piece was about national trends, including his finding that student-facing liberal administrators outnumber conservative ones by a ratio of 12 to 1, making them more far more liberal, as a group, than students and faculty members.

So he was surprised when, almost immediately after the paper was published in October, his office door was vandalized with profanity and messages urging him to quit. This month a group of students calling itself the Diaspora Coalition released a lengthy list of demands centering on the college’s support of low-income and minority students. The students also demanded a review of Abrams’s tenure, a review that they wanted to take part in conducting.

Though Abrams received widespread support off campus, including on social media, he says he feels abandoned on campus, by an administration and a faculty whose support of him and denunciation of the tenure-review demand have, he says, been tepid.

Abrams spoke with The Chronicle about his research and what it’s like holding conservative views on a liberal campus. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How did you define “student-facing,” and how did you determine which institutions you would survey?

A. We were not looking at provosts or presidents or academic deans or people involved in curricular programming. We looked at administrators who primarily deal with students — so deans of student life, folks who deal with residential life, folks who deal with student programming, that sort of thing. We have roughly 5,400 institutions of higher education. A team of graduate and undergraduate researchers and myself went through the list of categories that U.S. News and World Report uses. Then we selected random samples from all of them to make sure we had a representation in college type and location.

Q. So it’s a snapshot of all of higher education, from the elite private colleges to community colleges?

A. Very much so. That was very important. It took almost a year to put that all together.

Q. You called for more ideological balance in programming. What does that mean? There’s a conservative position on, say, where the tax rate should be or the legality of abortion, but what’s the opposing view to what I feel is a shared value at most universities, which is agreeing that diversity is needed? Sticking with some of the programming you mentioned in your op-ed, what’s the ideological balance to “Understanding White Privilege”?

A. Unless we have hours to discuss it, it’s going to come out looking very bad, so I’m not going to talk about that. Sorry. That is a very nuanced topic. It’s a topic that should be discussed. A lot of this stuff is about inequality and opportunity. There are lots of ways to talk about inequality and opportunity. A lot of times people will say there’s just structural privilege. But there are other ways to talk about it, like talking about free markets and how capitalism works. There are multiple viewpoints when looking at these questions, which are all valid, by the way. At no point am I saying white privilege isn’t a topic that should be discussed. These are nuanced conversations. If you look at how a lot of these programs are being facilitated, they don’t have that nuance. They don’t have that balance.

Q. Why do you think administrators are so liberal?

A. These are great jobs for people with social-justice backgrounds. But if you deviate from that worldview, you may not want to apply for a job like that. You may find yourself under attack if you don’t toe the party line. I’ll give you an example. On more than one occasion, when the college has searched for an economics professor, my colleagues have lamented to me that they could only look for candidates in a certain subset of schools, because only those schools represent the values and worldview that they’re comfortable with. That’s the kind of thinking that pervades higher education, and it’s dangerous.

Q. I’m wondering why, though. Senior leadership at universities, certainly board members, are not so liberal.

A. Universities and colleges are really complex institutions. Trustees often have other careers. They’re looking at economic health, fund raising, buildings being built, degree programs, and so on. They’re not in the weeds. You have to be in the weeds to really see what’s going on. That’s why I wrote this op-ed. So much attention is paid to presidents and deans and faculty and students. But there’s another pillar people seem to forget. That’s the growth in this huge bureaucratic glut that functions in an almost autonomous way. I now feel very comfortable in saying that trustees are well aware of this as a problem. Since the publication of the Times op-ed, I’ve been contacted by well over a hundred boards of trustees asking to talk about it.

Q. Aside from the top-line finding that student-facing administrators are more liberal than faculty members, was there anything else in the data that stuck out to you or was particularly noteworthy?

A. The op-ed was just one piece of a larger finding. I don’t want to say yet, because a book project will come out of this research.

Q. Can you tell me anything generally?

A. It’s very clear there’s a strong liberal bias among student-facing administrators, but it’s also very clear that they are deeply dedicated to their jobs and take them very seriously. To their credit, they spend a lot of time with their students. I was surprised that, though media coverage of free speech often fixated on professors being very engaged in these fights, if we take an empirical look, which I did, one of the things that emerges is that faculty are generally quite disengaged from campus life and their students. Spending time with students is not something that most faculty like to do, despite reports often showing they are on the front lines protesting with their students. College administrators, meanwhile, are very heavily engaged. That became very clear.

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.