Over the past several months, David Horowitz, a conservative commentator, has been urging state legislatures and Congress to adopt an “Academic Bill of Rights” that would encourage colleges to foster a plurality of political and religious beliefs in hiring faculty members, making tenure decisions, and performing other academic activities. At its core, the “Academic Bill of Rights” deals with the single most important issue facing higher education today -- that the humanities and social-science faculties of American colleges are preponderantly, and in many instances overwhelmingly, liberal or left-leaning from a political perspective. That skewing limits the possibility for truly free and open debate on campus, easily slides into political bias against students in the classroom, and -- a less noticed but equally important consequence -- hinders faculty members’ understanding of the world in which they live.
But while the problem is genuine and pressing, the approach embodied in the “Academic Bill of Rights” is unwise, inviting unprecedented governmental and judicial intrusion into the personnel decisions of higher education. It is far better to engage colleges in a program of self-reform.
As a conservative who has experience both as a professor and an administrator, I recognize that any such reform will take time: There simply aren’t lots of young conservative Ph.D.'s on the job market to change the composition of faculties quickly. While academic talent is found among students across the ideological spectrum, students on the left are far likelier than those on the right to pursue a Ph.D. with the goal of college teaching. Conservative students who are initially drawn to the humanities often decide after four years of classroom sparring with liberal faculty members that the integrity of such studies is suspect. Also, being likelier to have a Hobbesian/Calvinist view of human nature, that individuals in a free society should deal with their own problems rather than rely on government, conservative students are more prone than their liberal peers to see fields like law, business, or medicine as career options that offer the possibility of making the world a better place.
Still, one might wonder: Even if careers in higher education are disproportionately attractive to students on the left, why don’t academics change their political views as time passes, like people in other professions? At least three forces make such shifts uncommon.
First, there is the simple power of group-think. For at least half a century, being on the left politically has been a conventional trait of professors, and academics, like most other people, are reluctant to violate community norms, shock their colleagues, and risk becoming eccentrics or even outcasts.
Second, academics in the humanities and social sciences are more insulated from the challenges of the market than are most professionals, and hence they misunderstand it. For the most part, having secured tenure, they work at institutions where the chief determinant of salary is usually length of service, rather than the quality of job performance. Moreover, colleges have relatively long histories (Quick, name a respected institution of higher learning founded since World War II), so academics tend to assume that maintaining institutional continuity and health in a society that is undergoing steady change is not a particularly challenging task. Thus, they vastly undervalue the importance of individuals who exercise practical imagination and problem-solving entrepreneurialism in society, and they often minimize the importance of retaining the social incentives that encourage risk taking. The academy, in short, provides a cocoon that inclines academics to see economic change chiefly in terms of social destruction.
Third, academics in the humanities and social sciences rarely need to confront anything like a chastening reality. More often than not, they generate and debate interesting theories that fall in and out of fashion, but experience rarely pronounces a theory wrong. For disciplines like history, literature, philosophy, political theory, American studies, and so on, reality is simply not much of a constraint when academics confront their major questions. (Which is why, in such disciplines, the notion that reality is a social construction is so widely credited.) And if reality rarely intrudes to require people to reconsider their intellectual baggage, they have little cause to change their most fundamental professional views.
Does any of this matter? In some ways, it’s possible to exaggerate the deleterious consequences of the political imbalance on faculties. After all, much subject content, even in the humanities and social sciences, is not readily reducible to ideological terms. Moreover, most faculty members avoid engaging in overtly tendentious instruction. They know and try to respect the difference between responsible and irresponsible teaching.
But unhappily, anecdotal evidence increasingly suggests that the line separating professionalism from propaganda is eroding. We increasingly read and hear of faculty members who view their classrooms as soapboxes, using both the lectern and their grading power to promote a political vision. A recent, shameful example, described in David Horowitz’s online news magazine, FrontPageMagazine.com, involves a classroom instructor who directed students to write essays on why George Bush was a war criminal and who docked a paper that dared to indict Saddam Hussein. But the central point is that even when faculty members behave responsibly in the classroom, an imbalance of political views still damages the intellectual environment of the campus.
For example, faculty members usually have wide influence on the choice of outside speakers who will be invited to campuses, and they prefer to bring in speakers whose views resonate with their own. Also, students are fully aware of the political views of those who teach them, and some, respecting their teachers, come to believe that intelligent analysis leads naturally to the “enlightened” views of the liberal faculty. In addition, a liberal bias in the faculty can exercise a chilling effect on students, prompting them as they write papers to avoid subjects or views that their instructors are known to disapprove of and to “adopt” views they privately think are silly. That problem is widespread on my campus and others, and a frequent source of jokes among my students.
Most important, when campus officials prepare to discuss an important issue publicly -- for example, abortion, the war in Iraq, or church-state relations -- they are often hard pressed to find advocates to participate on the conservative side. The consequence: The debate is truncated, and an effort to educate becomes, in effect, another exercise in complacency and propaganda.
What is needed is a new way of thinking about remedying this political imbalanceone that will require faculty members, administrators, and boards of trustees to exercise the reasonableness they publicly commend by examining the consequences that an educationally unhealthy imbalance imposes. I can offer six suggestions, drawing on techniques used a generation or so ago to increase the number of women and minority faculty members:
Organize discussions about the importance of political diversity to the college’s intellectual vitality. The most important step is to raise the issue of imbalance -- frequently and in many different forums. Before a faculty will be ready to commit itself to changing its patterns of hiring, it must be persuaded that a wider range of political views in a community of learners is a good and just thing. That argument is not hard to make, and while many faculty members will probably resist it privately, few will be prepared to deny its validity openly.
Schedule recruiting workshops for departments engaged in searches. Such training will underline the central role that job searches can play in correcting the imbalance and suggest ways that candidacies of conservative professors might be encouraged.
Create job descriptions that reinforce the institution’s efforts to hire conservatives. Some academic specialties are likelier than others to have conservatives in their midst. For example, history departments might look for military-history scholars, political-science departments might express an interest in appointing a Straussian, sociology departments might advertise for urbanists, and philosophy departments might look for people who study scholastic philosophy. It is likely that every discipline has a subspecialty that is a redoubt of the more conservatively inclined. Every year some new hirings should focus on such areas.
Require search committees to include at least one conservative faculty member. If practicable, that will ensure that, as the committee evaluates candidates, the institution’s determination to increase the proportion of conservative professors will remain front and center.
Consider securing new faculty members from nontraditional channels. If, for example, a retired military officer or business executive were to show an interest in an academic appointment, an institution committed to widening intellectual diversity should explore ways in which the retiree’s hopes and the institution’s ambitions might work together. When you look to hire nontraditional people, you often find them in nontraditional ways.
Develop incentives for new hiring approaches. An institution committed to change needs tools to deal with departments that stick with older patterns of hiring. The best way is for the administration to begin transferring positions that come open to other departments -- always an attention-getter.
Most faculty members consider themselves to be fair-minded and want others to see them in the same way. If they realize that they are participating in a pattern of hiring that undermines the intellectual mission of their institutions, they will most likely abandon that pattern for a fairer one. They will move toward creating an atmosphere of equal employment opportunity out of conviction, not as a consequence of legislative command, and they will thereby protect their valuable right to select personnel by their own lights and without judicial oversight. Then, as colleges begin hiring more conservatives, the flow of conservative college graduates into Ph.D. programs will quicken steadily.
Although a quick solution to the existing imbalance between liberal and conservative professors is not at hand, making progress, and laying the foundation for further progress built upon that progress, lies within the grasp of colleges. All of higher education -- faculty members and students alike -- will be the better for it.
Reed Browning is a professor of history at Kenyon College.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 31, Page B14