In three New York Times columns on the ideological echo chamber in higher education, Nicholas Kristof argues that colleges “embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological.”
Unsurprisingly, while Kristof drew support from professors on the right, many scholars rushed to denounce his conclusions and challenge his facts. Most recently, Aaron Hanlon, an English professor at Colby College, argued that Kristof “has an untenably narrow view of campus life and politics” and approvingly cites the City University of New York history professor Angus Johnston, who wrote: “the typical American college student today … doesn’t attend a tiny, insular liberal-arts college. The median American college student attends a public college, never lived in a dorm, isn’t studying liberal arts. There’s no liberal bubble.”
While it is certainly true that the “typical college student” is no longer someone in her or his late teens studying the liberal arts on a leafy campus, the problem with these critiques is that they lack any systematic evidence about what politics and college life are actually like.
The empirical reality, today, is that colleges are overwhelmingly liberal, and that there is very little variation by institutional type and selectivity. The part-time older student at a large public university is being exposed to the same ideological leanings of professors as those students who reside in elite, leafy, small colleges.
Consider, from the Higher Education Research Institute’s national surveys of faculty members and students, that in 2014, 32 percent of first-year students considered themselves liberal or far left, compared with 60 percent of faculty members. That ratio of faculty-to-student political sentiment has increased since 1989, when the numbers were 24-percent liberal or far-left students to 41-percent for faculty members. That rise must have been at the expense of moderates, for in 1989, as now, there were few conservative faculty members. Meanwhile, the portion of the American populace at large that considers itself liberal or far left, 26 percent, is smaller even than that among students and has hardly changed in recent decades — it was 27 percent in 1989.
In other words, the data show that students are not the ones moving to the left. It’s the faculty. It follows, then — since it is faculty members who return year after year as students move on — that professors, not students, create the liberal bubble on campuses.
Liberal students and ideas are front and center in campus news coverage. Faculty members are usually an afterthought. But professors are the ones who help shape the students’ minds and set the tone for the intellectual climate. Their jobs include presenting long-term outlooks and contextualizing current events for their students. They influence, considerably, students’ reactions to President Trump, to the Republican Party, and to conservative policies.
When Kristof and others focus on a narrow group of small liberal-arts colleges, they miss the larger nationwide change in campus ideology. All types of colleges, public and private, elite and nonelite, have seen an increase in the proportion of liberal faculty members. The exceptions are religious colleges, which are less liberal in general and constitute 9 percent of colleges. It is simply incorrect to believe that some campuses have moved far left while others are more centrist and balanced. Almost all colleges, 91 percent, have seen an increase in the proportion of liberal faculty members.
Not only have the overall proportions of liberal faculty members risen since 2001 at both elite and nonelite colleges — with elite colleges defined as those among the 30 percent most selective in SAT scores — but the difference between the percentages of liberal faculty members on each kind of campus is small. In 2014 there was only a five-percentage-point difference, and even that gap has narrowed significantly over the past 25 years, again suggesting that the faculty shift to the left is a general and powerful phenomenon.
Collectively, these data make a strong case that ideological diversity on campuses nationwide is diminishing and under threat. The attacks against Kristof for focusing on narrow and particular cases may be legitimate insofar as he should have cast a wider net. But the thrust of his argument is no less valid, especially in light of these larger trends.
Kristof is correct that we need more variety in viewpoints. Professors have every right to their political and ideological positions, but we should worry when the very places we hold as marketplaces of ideas have so little ideological balance. Ideology anchors a lot of academic thought, and a multiplicity of ideas sets the stage for intellectual progress. The liberal lean is a fact, not a theory, and it should be acknowledged and remedied.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
