Cambridge, Mass.
Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released on Saturday. The study -- which is arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s -- found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
But at a symposium on Saturday at Harvard University, the study’s authors cast doubt on certain claims made by conservative critics of academe. They emphasized that American faculty members are not uniformly left-wing. On most issues, they said, college instructors’ views are better characterized as “centrist” or “center-left.” And there is evidence of a convergence toward moderation: Faculty members who are 35 or younger are less likely than their elders to be left-wing (and also less likely to be conservative).
“The claim of extreme leftism is not well supported,” said Solon J. Simmons, an assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. “But the number of conservatives -- 9.2 percent -- is lower than what one might have found in the past. If there is any change in the data over time, conservatives seem to be falling away from the academy and being replaced by, perhaps, moderates.” Mr. Simmons conducted the study with Neil Gross, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard.
“We’re trying to move discussion of these questions away from partisan polemic and back toward rigorous social science,” Mr. Gross said in an interview on Thursday. In their paper, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” Mr. Gross and Mr. Simmons criticize several widely publicized recent studies of faculty beliefs as poorly designed exercises in political point-scoring. Rather than simply shining a light on the raw fact of academic liberalism, they argue, scholars should carefully analyze the complexities and contexts of faculty beliefs.
Mr. Gross and Mr. Simmons’s survey drew responses from 1,417 full-time instructors at 927 colleges of all types. The scholars designed their sample to give weight to the 20 fields with the most undergraduate majors; instructors in certain professional fields, including law and medicine, are underrepresented. The project was financed by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, a small foundation with interests in science and education.
Among the study’s findings:
- Faculty members lean sharply to the left on issues of gender, sexuality, and foreign policy. Three-quarters agree that abortion should be legal “if a woman wants it for any reason.” Eighty percent agree with the statement, “President Bush misled the American people about the reasons to go to war in Iraq.”
- On issues of race and economic policy, the leftward tilt is much less pronounced. Among those who expressed any opinion, only 50.7 percent support affirmative action in college admissions. Sixty percent agree with the statement that “the government should do more to help needy Americans, even if it means going deeper into debt.” That is similar to the general population’s belief: In a national survey conducted this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 54 percent of Americans agreed with the same statement. On another item -- “Business corporations make too much profit” -- faculty members appear significantly more conservative than the general public. Slightly less than half of faculty members agreed with that statement, compared to 67 percent of Americans in the Pew survey.
- Liberal-arts colleges have the highest concentrations of left-of-center faculty members. Only 3.9 percent of instructors at liberal-arts colleges are conservatives. Community colleges have the smallest proportion of liberals (37.1 percent) and the highest proportion of conservatives (19 percent). “Elite, Ph.D.-granting institutions” fall in the middle, with 10.2 percent of faculty members identifying themselves as conservative. That pattern contrasts with the well-known studies conducted in the early 1970s by Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, who found that conservatives were rarest at the most elite institutions.
Conservatives are rarest in the humanities (3.6 percent) and social sciences (4.9 percent), and most common in the health sciences (20.5 percent) and business (24.5 percent). Only 7.8 percent of instructors in the physical and biological sciences are conservatives, which is a sharp decline from the level found by Mr. Ladd and Mr. Lipset in the 1970s.
- Faculty members broadly support the idea of political openness on campus. When asked whether “the goal of diversity should include fostering diversity of political views among faculty members,” 68.8 percent agreed. (That figure struck one participant in the symposium as disturbingly low. “Where are the other 31 percent?” asked Jonathan L. Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at New York University. “What are they thinking?”) When asked whether “professors are as curious and open-minded today as they have ever been,” 79.9 percent of the total sample said yes -- but 46.3 percent of the conservative respondents disagreed.
The scholars at Saturday’s meeting offered a wide variety of arguments about what those numbers might mean, and whether they are a problem for academe. Harvard’s former president, Lawrence H. Summers, praised the sophistication of Mr. Gross and Mr. Simmons’s study but said that he views the results more pessimistically than they do.
“The data in this paper surprised me in the opposite direction that it surprised the authors,” said Mr. Summers, who is now a university professor at Harvard. “It made me think that there is even less ideological diversity in the American university than I had imagined.”
In his remarks, Mr. Summers concentrated on a subset of the data concerning elite, Ph.D.-granting universities. In humanities and social-science departments at those institutions, Mr. Summers pointed out, not a single instructor reported voting for President Bush in 2004.
“There is an overwhelming tilt toward the progressive side,” Mr. Summers said. “Compared to the underrepresentation of other groups whose underrepresentation is often stressed, the underrepresentation of conservatives appears to be rather substantially more, perhaps.”
Mr. Summers added that much more research needs to be done on how faculty members’ beliefs affect their students’ development (if at all). But he speculated that such effects do exist. “Given that faculties control what perspectives people are exposed to at the most formative moment of their intellectual life,” he said, “it is hard to believe that the nature of their beliefs and the availability of alternative beliefs is a matter of irrelevance.”
But Mr. Summers scorned proposals by the conservative activist David Horowitz for state intervention to promote ideological diversity on campus. “It would be extraordinarily unwise and dangerous,” Mr. Summers said, “for government officials to seek to regulate, bribe, financially punish, or otherwise drive toward greater diversity in these dimensions. I can imagine few things that would be more destructive than political-party litmus tests for hiring, not least because of the stigmatization of the conservatives who would be hired.”
Several speakers discussed whether the political lopsidedness of the professoriate is best explained by self-selection or by socialization and subtle pressures to conform. Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, suggested that conformity has become a more serious problem in the humanities as the job market has gotten worse.
“Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more serious the barriers to entry,” he said. “You can become a lawyer in three years, but the average time to a doctoral degree in the humanities is now close to 12 years.”
Mr. Menand said that his impression is that dissertation topics in English have changed little since 1990. “Placement and tenure anxiety doesn’t exactly encourage iconoclasm,” he said. The last great period of ferment in literary theory, he argued, came in the 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when people commonly earned degrees within five years and easily found jobs. With lower personal risks and sacrifices, he suggested, young scholars could afford to offend their elders and to shake up their disciplines.
Today, by contrast, graduate students are sacrificing a decade of their lives with no guarantee of a job at the end of the line. “Who would venture on such a career who did not share, or believe that he or she shared, most of the views of those institutions and gatekeepers?” Mr. Menand asked.
“If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of doctoral education,” Mr. Menand continued, “then the disciplines would have a better chance to be oxygenated with new ideas from people who are less invested in the current paradigms. ... I was trained in the 1970s. It’s 2007. I want some graduate student to tell me that I’m full of crap.”