Politics in the classroom is a huge problem for American higher education. But it’s not that there is too much of it. Actually, there is too little.
That’s the conclusion of a new book that takes on the long-running allegation by conservative critics that higher education is full of liberal professors who try to indoctrinate students. The majority of professors surveyed for the book say they keep their own politics out of the classroom. But an article about a survey of students—also just released—argues that undergraduates figure out professorial politics anyway, though such politics have a very limited influence.
The book, Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities (Brookings Institution Press, September), was written by three faculty members at George Mason University. It is based in part on a study they did in 2007 of 1,270 professors at 169 research universities.
The overwhelming majority of professors do call themselves liberal, the authors say, but that doesn’t mean their classrooms are dominated by their political views. The survey found that 95 percent of professors believe they are “honest brokers” among competing views. Sixty-one percent said politics seldom comes up in their classrooms, and only 28 percent said they let students know how they feel about political issues in general.
“To our surprise, we found that, far from being saturated in politics, the universities generally have all but ignored what used to be called civics and civic education,” the authors write.
Incomplete Concealment
But the article about students, which was released to The Chronicle this week, says professors are not as successful at hiding their political beliefs as they might think. The study, by April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner, is called “I Think My Professor Is a Democrat: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics,” and will be published in a forthcoming issue of P.S.: Political Science and Politics.
The article does not necessarily contradict the findings of Closed Minds. It did find that students agree that most professors do not specifically state what political party they belong to. But three-quarters of the 1,603 students whom the Woessners studied in political-science courses in the fall of 2006 and the spring of 2007 were able to correctly identify their professors’ political leanings anyway.
Ms. Woessner is an associate professor of political science at Elizabethtown College, and Mr. Woessner is an associate professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. They are known for being among the first to take a scientific look at the politics of the professoriate, exploring such hot-button issues as why so few conservatives join the ranks (The Chronicle, February 22).
To test the contention that liberal professors try to indoctrinate students, the Woessners also tried to determine whether students’ own political views changed over the course of a semester in a political-science course. While they found a very slight shift toward the Democratic side, they say the movement could not be attributed to the politics of the professors—the shift happened not only among students whose professors were Democrats but also among those whose professors were Republicans.
“Given that political-science professors appear to exert no real influence on students’ party loyalties,” the Woessners conclude, “it is unclear whether efforts to diversify the field by hiring more Republican professors would actually reduce the ‘liberalizing’ effects of higher education.”
Fading Political Debate
Closed Minds? was written by A. Lee Fritschler, director of executive education at George Mason’s School of Public Policy; Jeremy D. Mayer, an associate professor at the school; and Bruce L.R. Smith, a visiting professor at the school. In their introduction, the authors say one of them considers himself a Republican, another a moderate Democrat, and the third a more-liberal Democrat—although they do not say who is who.
The authors lament what they see as a generations-long shift away from political debate on college campuses, which they contend is crucial to students’ education. “Universities should be the home of lively and civilized political debate, and all too often, for a host of reasons, professors ignore political debate,” they write.
Pre-Civil War colleges, by contrast, “felt a responsibility for the moral and political education of their students,” the book says. But faculty members today are increasingly caught up in their specialized research interests or more concerned with scrutinizing texts by “gender, race, and sexual orientation themes,” the book says.
The “post-September 11 environment” has also made professors more reluctant to speak out on sensitive topics, the book concludes. “Serious scholars have fled from what to them seems pointless and unproductive confrontation.” (Professors of American politics, at least this year, may be an exception. They tell Chronicle reporters that the highly charged presidential race has produced a lot of debate in their classrooms.)
The book devotes a section to David Horowitz, a conservative critic who has helped lead the charge against what he calls liberal bias in the classroom. In an interview, Mr. Horowitz said he agreed there is not enough “political discourse” on campuses. But he said that is because people, including students, are intimidated by leftist faculty members.
“People are afraid of being called names by the left, like homophobe, racist, and Islamophobe,” he said. Students, he said, fear a backlash if they disagree with their professors on sensitive issues. “The prudent way to behave,” he said, “is just don’t raise the issue.”