Higher Ed Needs Checks and Balances

Scholars and observers have long noted that the academy leans leftward. In the 1970s, the sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset conducted a survey of professors and found that most were Democrats and identified as liberal. Since then, numerous studies have affirmed this basic finding and shown that the liberal-conservative imbalance has become more pronounced over time. In some fields, conservatives are almost completely absent. In the field of psychology, for instance, the ratio of liberals to conservatives was estimated to be about 2:1 earlier in the twentieth century but has reached roughly 17:1 in recent years. Other fields are similarly skewed.

In areas like chemistry or mathematics, we may not be overly concerned about the political identities of our professors. But universities also support scholarship in areas that address morality, social values, and public policy. In such cases, we should value, and even encourage, scholarship that draws on a wide range of ethical and political perspectives.

In response to the political imbalance of the professoriate, some elected officials have resorted to punitive measures, such as defunding programs or removing them from general-education requirements (Florida, for instance, eliminated sociology from its list of core courses). There is a better way. Professors, administrators, and other university stakeholders should consider checks and balances in academic hiring that might yield a wider range of outcomes.

Checks and balances are central to the United States government, built into the Constitution and discussed most famously by James Madison in the Federalist Papers. They amount to a separation of government functions among the three branches — the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary — whereby each can prevent the others from growing too powerful. Their relevance has been heightened recently, as many on the political center and left are nervously hoping they will limit authoritarian overreach or abuse of power by President Trump.

We propose that a system of checks and balances could be established among four of the “branches” that institutions of higher education already have — namely, trustees, high-level administrators, faculty, and accrediting agencies and external departmental-review committees. Two of those branches, the administration and the faculty, have become too unaccountable and too partisan. They have abused the public’s trust and squandered higher education’s legitimacy. Many Americans suspect, for good reason, that colleges and universities are not dispassionately pursuing the truth, wherever it leads, but are instead promoting partisan agendas. There is evidence that top public-policy programs have almost no conservative faculty, which makes one wonder what kind of debates are actually had there. Gender studies has fallen into “insular communities of highly dubious sacred beliefs and causes,” according to the sociologist Charlotta Stern. Even hard-science departments sometimes pursue overt social-justice agendas that at times take precedence over their pursuit of good science.

If we do not remedy this situation ourselves, the Trump administration, not to mention state governments, are likely to do it for us, in ways that may hamstring institutions of higher education and stymie the production of new knowledge.

But beyond warding off the worst assaults from the political right, checks and balances would have intrinsic benefits to knowledge-production. Strong imbalances in perspectives unavoidably allow groupthink, myside bias, and other related cognitive traps to degrade the quality of both scholarship and teaching. Ideological imbalance contributes to some segments of academe malfunctioning, making irresponsible claims that proliferate throughout public discourse as “the science” and distort public policy.

Here is one of many personal examples we could share illustrating the distorting impact of the current extreme viewpoint imbalance in academe. When Lawrence Eppard and Jacob Mackey were putting the finishing touches on their recent book (with Lee Jussim), The Poisoning of the American Mind, their publisher (an academic publisher, no less) forced them to remove a chapter detailing a number of widely accepted biological differences between men and women —differences that both the general public and most biologists agree exist.

When academic research has to pass through a gauntlet this suppressive of basic, widely agreed-upon facts, it is no wonder there is a lot of mistrust of the academy, especially on subjects that have become heavily politicized. If academe featured more viewpoint diversity, flawed, partisan ideas would have a tougher time making it through the institutionalized disconfirmation process without being revised in a more nuanced and objectively more accurate direction.

Of the groups who would need to be involved in an effective system of academic checks and balances, the biggest hit will have to be taken by faculty like us, who have traditionally had almost full autonomy when it comes to the crucial issue of hiring and departmental makeup. The free hand of the faculty has been part of the reason for the lack of viewpoint diversity.

Administrators such as presidents and provosts already technically have a checking and balancing power because they have final approval of new hires, even if they usually just rubber-stamp faculty decisions. Checks and balances, however, need to be exercised well before a department’s request to hire a given candidate lands on a president or provost’s desk for review. Faculty typically weed out ideologically incorrect candidates much earlier in the hiring process, which means that the candidates senior administrators are asked to approve or reject have already made it through a number of political-orthodoxy checkpoints. Past studies indicate that there is significant discrimination among faculty against conservative job candidates.

First, faculty may write job advertisements so as to exclude any candidate who does not toe a particular ideological line. Later, at the application-review stage, faculty may prioritize applicants whose DEI statements — which, according to Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy, are little more than “pledges of ideological allegiance” — signal adherence to approved political positions. Even later — at the interview stage, for instance — faculty may weed out candidates who they suspect are not fellow travelers.

It is of course entirely appropriate for unqualified people to be eliminated. The problem is that those with legitimate but (by the narrow standards of a politicized field) heterodox viewpoints may not get past an initial screening, no matter how good their record is or how sorely needed their perspectives might be.

Take the first two authors on this essay, Michael Jindra and Lawrence Eppard, as a case in point. They both write about inequality. Unlike many of their colleagues, however, they argue for a comprehensive approach, one that includes cultural and individual factors in addition to the structural ones favord by their fields involving policy or discrimination. Their approaches would run afoul of many hiring committees’ expectations in the first round of application reviews.

The old idea of faculty autonomy in hiring, defended by the AAUP, depends on a naive, idealistic vision of faculty being somehow above parochial human interests, serving only truth and the liberal arts. But faculty are like everybody else, and arguably even more prone to tribalism, ideological self-righteousness, and egoism than most people. We certainly aren’t immune to myside bias, which, as the psychologist Keith Stanovich points out, “is one of the most universal of the cognitive biases,” common even among the smartest and most highly educated groups.

The character of the academic jobs that get posted has to change. Universities should reduce the number of openings and job advertisements focused solely on approaches that embody a leftist orientation.

The faculty, of course, will object. This is where both administrators and trustees can act as a check and help institutions achieve more balance. Presidents, provosts, and trustees could get more involved in the hiring process, not by sitting on individual search committees, but by participating in a new sort of committee tasked with examining overall viewpoint imbalance in departments, divisions, and the school as a whole. In this role, they can check to see if proposed openings would ameliorate or exacerbate existing imbalances. Colleges and universities should also include a commitment to political nondiscrimination in their job ads.

How can administrators and trustees serving on the committees we propose gauge viewpoint imbalance, especially in fields with which they are unfamiliar? This can be a somewhat subjective process, but there are nonetheless some fairly reliable indicators of a leftward tilt. For example, there are popular academic buzzwords that indicate left-leaning perspectives, such as arguing for “structural” approaches, promoting “decolonization,” or utilizing any “critical” approach. The presence of these and other terms might indicate that a job ad is filtering for leftists.

In practice, such ads are easy to spot. For example, a job announcement at the University of Pennsylvania for an assistant professor in the clinical-educator track at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia wants someone well-versed in “intersectional microaggression prevention programming.” The term “intersectional” reflects a left-wing theory, and the modern construct of the “microaggression” has a strong claim to be pseudoscience.

Not all terms indicate bogus areas of study the way “microaggression” does. “Structural” factors, for example, are worth investigating, and “decolonization” was an important process in the mid-20th century — even if today it is usually used playfully, as a recommendation to excise the dead white males in your syllabus, or deadly seriously, as a call for a “revolution” “against Zionist colonialism.”

From the faculty side, committees featuring a balance of faculty members representing a variety of viewpoints could analyze teaching and research materials to identify the range of viewpoints presented in departmental course offerings and research output. Recommendations could then be made to help departments work toward achieving a greater balance in their teaching and research profiles in future hiring. (We do not propose removals of current tenured faculty to achieve this.) The same sort of review could be extended to the division or college level. This process might also improve the general-education offerings, which in most places are currently an incoherent mishmash of courses instead of a solid core curriculum.

Another related check would include accrediting agencies and outside department-review committees. Viewpoint imbalance could be included as a category in departmental evaluations. This measure would work synergistically with our proposal for balanced committees of faculty to review course materials and research. Accreditation and departmental-review processes already involve the collection of substantial amounts of data (e.g., examining course syllabi and publications, faculty evaluations, interviews with students, and so on), so it would not be onerous to add a question related to how fairly instructors represent various points of view in courses where a variety of theories or approaches are covered. Questions could also be added that probe whether a department’s classroom environments promote free expression. A better balance might also decrease the fear that some students have about speaking up in class.

Some will argue that the checks and balances we propose will erode standards of evidence in academic disciplines. Many faculty members cannot imagine that there is such a thing as a valid conservative point of view. Rather, they suppose conservative views, and methods associated with conservatives, have been all but exiled from academia precisely because they are invalid. Thus we’ve heard questions from skeptical colleagues such as: “So we have to hire flat-earthers in our science departments now?”

Of course we are not arguing for that. A lack of pseudoscience is a good thing. What we seek is well-curated debate that reflects academic standards and includes valid perspectives that are either missing or woefully underrepresented. Better balance would mean that peer review of both academic publications and research grants would be more effective and of higher quality, since work that repeats certain favored narratives tends to pass peer review, while work that favors disfavored narratives gets reviewed much more harshly.

It’s important to note, too, that we are not proposing an exact proportionality among viewpoints, but rather what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call “institutionalized disconfirmation.” This is the process whereby “communities of scholars … cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws.”

The ultimate goal is to seek truth, not necessarily to represent all views or to encourage the model of a university as a primary place to argue for political views. Viewpoint diversity is a way to avoid the traps of groupthink and myside bias. Truth is the overall goal — and truth can best be sought when departments accommodate genuine debate and heterogeneity. The gradual, structural change that our checks and balances would promote is far preferable to the forced changes currently being proposed and even imposed by legislators with vague goals and bad-faith motives.