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Students showed their support for Mitt Romney at an October rally at Tidewater Community College, in Norfolk, Va.
The standard conservative critique of American higher education goes something like this: Campuses are hothouses of radical politics, dens of liberal groupthink, playpens of ideologically coercive faculty who impose their leftist dogma on impressionable students. But according to Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood, that narrative lacks something vital: the voices of students themselves. For their new book, Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, they interviewed about 50 conservative undergraduates and recent alumni at two anonymous institutions. Becoming Right, published by Princeton University Press, is touted as “the first book-length study to be conducted on the contemporary campus Right.”
The Chronicle Review asked Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, to discuss the book’s findings by e-mail with Binder, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, and Wood, a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology there. The exchange has been edited and condensed.
Dear Amy and Kate,
Becoming Right promises to become a standard volume in the literature on the political climate on college campuses. The book contains copious opinions, stories, judgments, and disclosures offered by interviewees in their own words and at length. Your interpretations of their words come off as fair and sound. Your work marks a stark contrast to much of the discourse surrounding campus ideologies. Before we proceed with your findings, though, let’s hear about the design of the study. Bluntly: What did you want to do, and how did you go about doing it?
Dear Mark,
This is Amy. I’ll take this question since at the initial phases of the project Kate was not yet involved.
I hit upon the idea of studying conservative college students in the shower one summer day in 2006. I was listening to NPR, and in quick succession I heard a story about the midterm election (the one in which Republicans ultimately lost both houses of Congress), followed by another story about the divisive University of Colorado at Boulder ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill, and then one more story having to do with the conservative critique of universities as indoctrination mills-perhaps it was about David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights.
It was an aha! moment: I could take what I knew about schools as sites for political and cultural conflict from my previous book, Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2002); expand my research purview to higher education, which is having something of a glorious renaissance among sociologists; and hitch both of these to my political-junkie inclinations and deep interest in student life. It also didn’t hurt that conservatism, in general, is vastly understudied by sociologists.
As a longtime practitioner of the comparative case method, I wanted to talk with students on at least two campuses-what we came to call Western Public and Eastern Elite-to see if they experienced college, and even conservatism itself, in the same ways. Conservative critics of the academy tend to homogenize the oppressive encounters they say right-leaning students must endure, but the sociological literature on higher education, culture, and organizations suggests that we should expect there to be variation in how right-of-center students might talk about their experiences and act out their conservative politics.
Kate and I decided to interview students and alumni of two universities that vary along some dimensions (the public/private divide, selectivity of admissions) but that are similar along others (both are secular, Research I universities that conservative critics point to as “liberal bastions”). We also interviewed faculty and administrators at these universities, as well as leaders of national conservative organizations serving college students.
Our case-study methodology turned up findings that a different research design would not have, and points to the ways that particular higher-education settings-Eastern Elite and Western Public-nurture different styles of conservatism.
Dear Amy and Kate,
That’s an amusing origin story, Amy, though it could have led you to pursue the issue of liberal bias to other newsworthy and controversial episodes besides Ward Churchill. But I don’t think it would have revealed much, for the extreme cases tempt observers into faulty generalizations like, for instance, taking Churchill as representative of humanities and social-science faculty at research institutions. I was at UC-Boulder all of last year and heard several remarks about him by people from across the ideological spectrum. All of them remembered the affair as an odd experience, not one to interpret, but one at which to wonder.
You seemed to agree and chose not to study contentious professors but conservative students-not just the student who’d gotten into trouble with the forces of political correctness but a wider swath of students ranging from those running anti-affirmative-action bake sales to those keeping low profiles and just getting their degrees.
Let me ask two related questions. In recent years, many conservative and libertarian intellectuals and journalists have spoken and written at length about the political climate on campuses, leveling the bias charge, while professors have done the same to fend it off. First, what do the student voices provide that the professionals do not? Second-and this is a big interpretative question-in what way is (or is not) the student perspective more reliable, trustworthy, accurate, and significant than the professional perspective?
Dear Mark,
These questions go to the heart of our book. As you note, conservatives have long condemned universities for offering shelter to pampered intellectuals who seek to brainwash their young charges into the fog of political correctness. We wanted to compare what the critics had to say with what conservative students say for themselves. Students have been extensively spoken for, but not really spoken to. What we found out was very interesting.
First, the conservative critique did resonate among some students and alumni. Interviewees recounted occasions when they felt they had been subjected to a professor’s political rants, but more commonly to a subtler but pervasive smugness among faculty that “of course everyone in college is liberal.”
The students noted that course syllabi rarely included conservative thinkers and, when they did, that those ideas were presented only to be decimated later. Interviewees said that they had learned to pre-empt grading bias by writing papers that would appeal to liberal instructors, or that they had suffered grade retaliation when they had not taken such measures (or at least that a friend of a friend of their roommate’s had suffered retaliation).
Other interviewees gave a different story. They said that while liberal faculty members clearly outnumbered conservative ones, their professors generally did not politicize the classroom. While they complained that some professors teach faddish ethnic studies, gender studies, or any of a number of other “studies” classes, these students found ways to limit their exposure to what they considered to be tendentious and flaky content. When we asked about grade retaliation and efforts at indoctrination, we were told that eminent scholars would not stoop so low.
So what’s the difference between the first and second group of students? We found that it’s not so much individual sensitivities that distinguish these two sets of respondents as it is a result of the different universities they attended. Students at Western Public University were far likelier than their Eastern Elite peers to air grievances that sounded as if they came straight out of the conservative critics’ handbooks. Meanwhile, the Eastern interviewees distanced themselves from the David Horowitzes and Young America’s Foundations of the world.
That is not to say that no Western Public students found flaws in the broader conservative critique, or that all Eastern Elite interviewees expressed contempt for it. But as a general rule, the different universities created enormous variation in how well students and alumni felt the conservative critics had captured their experiences on campus.
Your second question, about the authority of students’ perspectives relative to that of academics, journalists, or pundits, is also important. On the one hand, the accounts of students are not intrinsically more reliable than others since, for one, any data source gives us only a partial understanding of what is really happening. On the other hand, it was essential to see what students had to say. All of our interviewees were well aware of the conservative critique that is made on their behalf. That some of our interviewees-mostly from Eastern Elite-departed significantly from the conservative critique tells us that students cannot merely be spoken for.
Dear Amy and Kate,
In your interviews, Western Public students had a more adversarial, suspicious relationship with their professors than did Eastern Elite students. While Westerns maintained that instructors and administrators politicized the classroom and campus, Easterns generally trusted campus authorities to respect academic freedom and promote responsible behavior. While Easterns and Westerns shared conservative beliefs, they had different “styles” (as you put it) of expressing them, the latter opting for provocative acts such as anti-affirmative-action bake sales, the former choosing reasoned editorials in the campus newspaper.
Your interpretation of this difference is the point that readers should heed. Eastern Elite has performed better than Western Public in reducing campus tensions. Why? You say: in large part because of the nature of interactions at each college. At Eastern, students and students, and students and faculty, are in closer contact, and because of the high selectivity of admissions at the institution, everybody there regards him- or herself as a prized part of an elite. It’s a close-knit community-smaller classes, fewer professors, lots of support.
At Western, the setting is sprawling, with vast first-year lecture courses and no extracurricular requirements. The administration looks not like a smiling home, but an indifferent bureaucracy. Faculty stand apart on a stage, and students may never see them outside of class. Loneliness and alienation set in.
Herein lies the far-reaching and actionable insight of your study. Politics provides those students a place to work through their loneliness. They find others who feel the same way. Instead of saying, “I’m lonely and lost, and I can’t make friends, and I’m nervous about approaching these distant and impersonal teachers and officials,” they can say, “I’m a conservative, and my politics have marginalized me, and it’s not right. I’ve found some like-minded peers, though, and we can join together and fight back.” In other words, political dissent may be, to some degree, a displacement of emotional difficulty.
This is not to say that Western students don’t have a legitimate gripe, or that professors don’t mouth off irresponsibly, or that the curriculum isn’t skewed to the left. Western students are entirely correct in their judgment of the curriculum, and one of the impressive things about their appraisal is the modest desire not to remove liberal outlooks from the classroom but only to have some acknowledgment of conservative alternatives. The very even-handedness of their position on the curriculum indicates that a university wouldn’t have to do much to respond to their complaint, for instance, by adding one course in women’s studies, entitled “Conservative Challenges to Feminism,” that manages to teach conservative thinkers without mocking them.
But that means acknowledging conservative positions, ideas, texts, and thinkers, a step faculty members seem unwilling to take. Conservative students in your study discern this uphill situation quite clearly, and they recognize that the absence of conservative thought diminishes the quality and rigor of the curriculum.
We face, then, a challenging task. Faculty members created the curriculum, they control it, and they don’t want to change it. When students complain about liberal bias in the classroom, administrators can’t intervene, and in any case, professors answer that the purpose of college is to encounter complex and troubling ideas and topics. Apparently, though, professors don’t like to assume that same duty themselves. I wonder what you make of faculty resistance to the kind of changes needed to overcome conservative estrangement from the curriculum. Or, if you disagree with my take on faculty intransigence, how so?
Dear Mark,
There is a lot packed into your question-some of which we agree with, some of which we don’t.
First, let’s state the obvious: Politicizing the classroom is unprofessional and disrespectful. Students at both colleges (albeit to a much lesser degree at Eastern Elite) reported hearing faculty make fun of George W. Bush or Sarah Palin, or editorialize about the idiocy of the Iraq War even when the topic had no relation to the course material. Faculty should be more aware of their positions of power and recognize that such talk is unfair to students who have different political beliefs. This stance is not incommensurable-at all-with faculty’s academic freedom.
We also encourage faculty to be more catholic in their approach to developing course syllabi and to think about how they could include conservative perspectives in their classes. When they do include conservative voices, they should do so not just to bash those viewpoints, but in order to provide students with a more complete picture of what the scholarly landscape of thought really looks like.
Finally, scholarship from the left and the right can-and should-be subject to interrogation and criticism. We ourselves have gotten much more sensitive to what we assign, what we say, and how we say it in a room full of undergraduates now that we have carefully studied the views of so many of them about their college experiences.
Of course there will be some professors who will consider this anathema. When we have presented our work at conferences or at other universities, there are usually one or two in the audience who wonder why we would even want to study young conservatives. One historian even compared our object of inquiry to his object of inquiry, Nazis. That was rattling.
But most professors tell us that they value conservative students, that they are often the best learners in class because they read the materials carefully and think critically. Others reported that they’d use our findings to be more sensitive. Despite the undeniable concentration of liberals in the academy, we do not see anything like indoctrination taking place.
One last word on this. While professors should be circumspect about their classroom practices, students also have to hold up their end of the bargain. If right-leaning student clubs choose to play gotcha politics with their professors, as promoted by national conservative organizations that encourage the “activist mentality” on campuses (as the Young America’s Foundation puts it), they aren’t going to make life easier for themselves as a group or as individuals who could benefit from closer, more trusting relationships with faculty.
Instead of assuming an adversarial stance, conservative students should consider visiting faculty one on one during office hours, where they are likely to discover that most professors are interested in and respectful of their ideas. One major commonality that we found among both Eastern and Western students was the contention that they received a superior education to their liberal peers because they regularly had their beliefs challenged. If both students and faculty are open to engaging with beliefs other than their own, all stand to learn more.
