Reactionary Propaganda Rides Again

Tenured radicals are real. So are tenured reactionaries. But that’s not a very important observation. In our recent essay, we scrutinized the evidence behind the claim that American colleges and universities are disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives. The charge of liberal bias has attained doctrinal status in conservative circles, where radical academics are blamed for a variety of social ills — from stoking racial divisions to undermining support for free speech. Our review of the empirical and historical evidence found that the conservative complaint about academic liberal bias is poorly supported.

But Phillip W. Magness raises concerns that merit response. The most important is his accusation that we ignore survey data from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which, he argues, shows that American faculty underwent a “rapid leftward shift” starting in the late 1990s. According to the HERI survey, the proportion of American faculty members self-identifying as “liberal” or “far-left” rose from 44.8 percent in 1998 to 59.8 percent in 2016-17. These data seem to suggest that in the late 1990s and through the early 2000s, faculty members moved decisively left, as compared with their students or the general public. Magness contends that because we do not discuss the long-term trends of the HERI survey in our article, we “badly misinterpret” the empirical evidence.

We don’t think so. In our essay, we acknowledged that roughly “60 percent of the professoriate are somewhere to the left of center.” The longitudinal HERI data (which chart a rise of faculty liberals up to 60 percent) are consistent with that appraisal. But the HERI survey is not a scientific study designed to understand faculty politics; it is a general questionnaire. The survey asks 55 questions, of which only one is about politics: “How would you characterize your political views?” Respondents classify themselves using a five-point scale: far left, liberal, middle of the road, conservative, and far right. That is a crude instrument for measuring as complex an issue as political position, and Magness makes it cruder by reducing his analysis to three boxes: conservative, liberal, and moderate.

We relied primarily on a 2006 study by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. Magness notes that we “place great weight” on their numbers. We do, because the Gross and Simmons study is the most comprehensive, rigorous, and methodologically robust study available. The academic literature on faculty politics is weak, and much of it is highly partisan. Many studies are scattershot looks at voter-registration records (a methodologically problematic approach); selectively focus on elite four-year, private institutions while ignoring the much larger realm of public universities and community colleges; or are produced by right-wing and libertarian organizations — like the Foundation for Economic Education — with an openly partisan political agenda. In contrast, the Gross and Simmons study has a well-constructed sample that incorporates a range of academic disciplines and institution types. It asks a large number of standardly worded questions aimed at assessing respondents’ political beliefs, pegging political self-identifications to actual policy positions. Methodologically, it is the best study we have of the topic, so it makes sense to look closely at its findings.

Gross and Simmons found a substantively centrist to left-of-center professoriate, certainly far more moderate than conservatives like Magness allege. Using a seven-point scale, Gross and Simmons reported the following range of self-reported positions: “extremely liberal”: 9 percent; “liberal”: 35 percent; “slightly liberal”: 18 percent; “middle of the road”: 17 percent ;“slightly conservative”: 11 percent; “conservative”: 8 percent; and “extremely conservative”: 1 percent. Some 46 percent of professors described themselves in centrist terms, as “slightly liberal,” “middle of the road,” or “slightly conservative.” If one codes the “slightly liberal” cohort as liberal rather than moderate, one finds a professoriate just over 60 percent left of center — essentially the same results as in the 2016-17 HERI survey. But because the “slightly liberal” cohort expressed substantively more centrist views than did liberals when asked about policy matters, Gross and Simmons say there are good reasons for treating this center-left group as part of the moderate bloc.

Like all data, these results can be sliced and diced in different ways, but no matter how they are grouped, they do not support the allegation that academe is overrun by tenured radicals, or even that it is dominated by the far left. What both studies support is the conclusion that the bulk of academics are moderate or slightly left of center. If the academy’s center-leftists increasingly began to identify as “liberal” rather than “moderate” around the year 2000, they were not alone in doing so. Survey data from Gallup shows that in 2000, some 28 percent of Democrats identified as liberal, versus more than 40 percent who identified as moderate. By 2018, the self-identified liberals had increased to 51 percent. Interpretation of the HERI data needs to factor in this broader trend of political relabeling among left-of-center Americans. Moreover, self-reported labels only tell us so much; identifications such as “moderate” or “liberal” are not timeless and static. The meanings people attach to these labels are constantly shifting in relation to political evolutions in the society at large. If a country is yanked rightward by its conservative wing, then yesterday’s moderates might be today’s liberals.

Magness is not the only conservative commentator who has presented the HERI data as proof that leftist orthodoxy rules the Ivory Tower. In our academic research, we have recounted how right-wing activists and think tanks have actively worked to persuade the American public that academe is dominated by dogmatic leftists. For decades, conservative media activists and libertarian think tanks have worked to discredit the university, weaken public confidence in academic life, and create in think tanks a parallel intellectual ecosystem to counter mainstream knowledge-producing institutions. Magness’s response to our essay is a case in point. The American Institute for Economic Research, where Magness holds an appointment, is a think tank dedicated to promoting free-market values and combatting “the ideologies of socialism and centralization.” The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), another free-market think tank with which Magness is affiliated, has, since its founding in 1946 by Leonard Read, sought to spread the “faith” in the “miracle” of the market.

There are of course progressive think tanks and advocacy groups, too; being associated with a think tank is not per se intellectually discrediting. But, as Thomas Medvetz notes in his study Think Tanks in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012), conservatives have largely dominated the think-tank space, in part because of financial support from American business. And FEE has a distinctive history of tampering with the academic marketplace in order to bolster right-wing views. In the 1940s, Read helped to prop up the career of the right-wing Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, considered one of the founders of neoliberalism. Mises was unable to find an academic position after fleeing Europe for the United States during World War II, so Read hired him to write and lecture for FEE. He also joined forces with a group of conservatives to arrange and pay for Mises to obtain a position as a lecturer at New York University. From this privately funded perch — obtained without the benefit of open academic competition or independent scrutiny of his claims — Mises became a major voice for free-market ideology in America.

Mises was not simply a champion of free enterprise. He was a dogmatic absolutist, unwilling to contemplate intermediate alternatives between laissez-faire economics on the one hand and Stalinist central planning on the other. Among other things, he opposed child-labor laws and public education. Even scholars who approve of his views overall have noted that he was extreme and rigid in his thinking. Milton Friedman, the most influential conservative economist of the 20th century, rejected the Austrian approach, which he said had “done the world a great deal of harm.” Without intervention from think tanks like FEE, Mises’s outlier ideas would probably not have had much influence in the United States. How ironic that by interfering in the academic market, FEE kept alive free-market dogmas that might otherwise have perished in the marketplace of ideas. Our essay described how libertarian think tanks have for decades sold a narrative about liberal academic bias. Magness, affiliated with two such think tanks, perpetuates the claim.

Professors broadly reflect the demographic from which they are drawn: highly educated people. In fact, the academy’s political evolution in the 21st century reflects the growing share of highly educated Americans who hold left-of-center views. Pew surveys show that in 1994, 31 percent of Americans who had attended graduate school held consistently liberal or mostly liberal views. By 2015, that figure had risen to 54 percent. In 1994, only 7 percent of postgraduate respondents gave consistently liberal answers to survey items. In 2015, 31 percent did. By this metric, there has been a 23-percentage-point rise in Americans with postgraduate experience who hold liberal views. Two implications follow. First: The pool of potential academics has become more left-leaning. Second: The academy remains representative of the population from which it draws its ranks.

This raises a difficult but important question: Why are educated people more liberal? One obvious answer is that liberals are more drawn to academic life; another is that education makes people more liberal. Evidence suggests that both are true. A large research literature finds that higher education tends to make people more concerned with the socially disadvantaged and more tolerant of political dissent. The Pew data suggest that the liberalizing effects of higher education have become more pronounced in the last two decades, a shift only partially explained by growing numbers of women — who tend to be more liberal — receiving advanced degrees.

It could be the case that liberal faculty members are indoctrinating their students into leftism, but attempts to find evidence of this have failed. Indeed, a striking study published in 2009 by the conservative scholars Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner noted that conservative students report a higher level of satisfaction with their overall college experience than any other political group. Conservatives also report the highest level of satisfaction with “campus community.” These findings refute claims of a “chilly” environment for conservatives, or that conservatives feel victimized, ostracized, or disrespected on most campuses. All students have some negative experiences in college, but these data show that any negative experiences that conservatives may undergo do not affect their overall satisfaction with their college experience. (Interestingly, moderates get the lowest grades of any group. It is hard to know what that means, but perhaps it reflects professors’ preferences for strongly argued views of any type.)

These findings suggest that, if conservatives are under-represented among faculty, it is not because they experienced a hostile climate as students. Do conservatives self-select out of academe for other reasons? The Woessners find evidence that they do. Conservatives and liberals don’t just hold divergent political opinions; they also have different values, life goals, and personal priorities (and these are likely instilled well before most students enroll in college). Conservatives tend to prioritize being well off financially and raising a family; liberals want to develop a meaningful philosophy of life and have a high degree of independence and autonomy in their work. Liberals also “tend to score higher on [measures of] creativity and excitement-seeking, while conservatives outperform in orderliness and striving for achievement.” Given that academic life tends to pay poorly, especially in the early years; that it valorizes creativity and offers autonomy; and that the academic tenure clock is notoriously at odds with prime child-rearing years, it makes sense that many conservatives will choose other career paths. Indeed, the Woessners note that one way to attract more conservatives into academe would be to foster more family-friendly policies, including subsidized housing and high-quality health insurance, something for which liberals — especially feminists — have been arguing for a long time.

Another part of the story could be that when people get educated, they see that many reigning conservative ideas leave us unable to solve the most pressing issues of our time. Consider the problem of how to pull nations out of poverty — a dilemma now greatly exacerbated by Covid-19, which may swell the ranks of the global poor by as much as half a billion. For decades, with support from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, political leaders from London to Lisbon and Seoul to Sydney embraced a neoliberal view. They argued that the road to prosperity runs through free markets, ideally only modestly regulated, if regulated at all. But as the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has emphasized in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (Penguin, 2010), there is little evidence to support the neoliberal view of economic development. In fact, history suggests the opposite: The performance of developing countries was generally better when their development was state-led and worse when they tried market-oriented reform. The same is true even of the United States, in its transition from an agrarian slave economy into a formidable industrial power. Competitive capitalism is part of the story of American prosperity — but so are protectionism, tariffs, subsidies, and other interventionist policies that conservatives typically reject. And of course, the New Deal was a response to market failure on a global scale.

By the time Leonard Read was promoting Ludwig von Mises in America, the inadequacies of Austrian economics were already clear. Yet, since that time, right-wing think tanks like FEE remain steadfast in their insistence on promoting ideas that Chang (and others) have shown have failed. The failures extend beyond matters that are purely economic; they also include climate change, the opioid crisis, and, now, Covid-19. It is no coincidence that self-reported conservatives are far more likely to reject or dismiss the scientific evidence of climate change or refuse to wear masks. To accept the evidence is to accept the need for government intervention — in the marketplace and in our lives — which sits uneasily both with the radical individualism promoted by many conservatives and with the prevailing conservative ideology that tells us to trust the “magic” of the marketplace to solve our problems.

Elsewhere, we have shown that a good deal of climate-change denial is “implicatory” — conservatives doubt the science because they don’t like its implications: that climate change is a massive market failure, that it threatens the very prosperity that capitalism is designed to foster, and that the various credible solutions all require a governmental response to address the market failure. It didn’t have to be this way: There are market-based approaches to climate change that conservatives could have embraced, and some did. But most did not, taking instead the path of denying the reality or severity of climate change and assuring us that, if it turned out to be real and severe, then we could trust the market to do its magic. But markets are not magic; they are human institutions which sometimes work well and sometimes fail. And societies have a number of critical needs — public health being an obvious one — that markets do a poor job of addressing.

When it comes to the alienation of educated Americans from conservative ideas, conservatives have only themselves to blame. By rejecting facts instead of adapting to new information — by refusing to budge from the same free-market dogmas they have been pushing since the 1930s — conservatives have created the wedge between educated Americans and conservative thinking that they now hypocritically lament. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu famously said that reality has a well-known liberal bias. Present circumstances support a slightly different formulation: Conservatives have become biased against reality. Until the right faces reality, it will have trouble winning over anyone who pays attention to evidence — as, of course, all good professors do.