Abstract
Lawrence M. Eppard and Jacob L. Mackey on the partisan professoriate.
Americans today have little faith in our core institutions. According to Gallup, public confidence in government, K-12 schools, big business, news outlets, and organized religion has reached some of the lowest levels they’ve ever recorded.
Colleges and universities have not been immune to these trends. Per Gallup, a strong majority (68%) of Americans believe that higher education is headed in the wrong direction. Barely more than a third (36%) of Americans express a high level of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities, down from 57% only a decade ago. The plunge in confidence since 2015 has manifested most dramatically among Republicans, whose confidence has fallen from 56% to 20%.
Among those who tell Gallup that they have very little confidence in higher education, the most frequent reasons they give are related to “political agendas,” followed closely by “wrong focus/ teaching the wrong things,” and “cost/ expenses.”
The public’s cratering faith has opened the door for Republicans to act on their long-standing desire to radically transform academia. The current administration has seized this opportunity, taking unprecedented action and telegraphing more to come.
Those of us in academia should rightfully defend ourselves against attacks that are unfair and/or in bad faith. But it is also vitally important that we take any valid criticisms seriously—and there are many. This will not only help to restore public confidence in higher education but, by addressing real problems, make our colleges healthier in the long run.
liberal bias on campus
A long-standing criticism that requires our urgent attention is liberal bias in teaching and scholarship.
It can be tempting for academics to fall victim to the genetic fallacy—the notion that we can reject criticisms out of hand if they come from those whom we deem to be “bad people.” But the accusation of liberal bias, despite its usual source, is valid, and the situation is only getting worse.
Most data show that college students and professors alike are disproportionately liberal in their politics. This is no secret. (Administrators as a group might be even more liberal, according to survey data from NORC researcher Karen Grigorian.) The real question is if this imbalance distorts our pursuit of truth and, if so, what to do about it.
In a 2024 survey of 58,807 students at 257 colleges administered by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the ratio of liberal-to-conservative (L:C) students was a little more than 2:1. At 89% of the colleges in the study, the predominant political viewpoint on campus was liberal. The average L:C student ratio on the predominantly liberal campuses was 7:1. The average conservative-to-liberal (C:L) student ratio on the 11% of campuses that were predominantly conservative was 2:1.
Among those who tell Gallup that they have very little confidence in higher education, the most frequent reasons they give are related to "political agendas."
Such an L:C imbalance among the student body might be defensible as a mere reflection of the relevant demographics, given that 18- to 24-year-old registered voters nationwide are also disproportionately liberal.
A major imbalance among faculty members, however, is less defensible, since there is a nearly equal split between Democrats and Republicans among American voters as a whole.
In a 2016-2017 survey of 20,771 faculty at 143 colleges, University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers found an L:C ratio of 5:1. Most other studies either confirm this ratio or find an even larger gap. In a 2020 analysis of the voter registrations of 12,372 college professors, for instance, Brooklyn College business professor Mitchell Langbert and FIRE social psychologist Sean Stevens found a Democrat-to-Republican (D:R) ratio of 8.5:1. In the same sample, they found the D:R political donor ratio to be an astounding 95:1 (see the figures above and on the previous page for discipline-specific ratios).
Our biggest concern is how the ideological imbalance on campuses threatens the pursuit of truth in our teaching and research.
Data suggests that this liberal imbalance has been growing over time. In 1989, the first year of the UCLA survey, the researchers found that 42% of college professors were liberal—a number that grew to 60% in 2016, their most recent survey. Over the same period, the conservative share of professors fell from 18% to 12% (see the figure on the next page). Surveys of the American public do not show a similar lurch to the left, meaning the professoriate has been moving away from the general population.
Not only is the professoriate made up of a far larger proportion of liberals than the general U.S. population, but some data suggest that faculty are much more extreme in their liberalism. Researcher Nicholas Havey at the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, for instance, recently estimated that 34% of faculty are liberal but 36% are far left (for a total of 70%). Other scholars’ data suggest a similar split.
is this a problem?
There are two reasons to be concerned about the ideological imbalance we have sketched. First, it threatens scholars’ pursuit of truth in our teaching and research. Second, the public is well aware of the imbalance. When half our fellow citizens feel they have no stake in or have been excluded from an institution, they will naturally lose confidence in and withdraw support for that institution. Worse, when they perceive that an institution is pursuing aims antithetical to their interests (such as leftwing activism, Marxism, or socialism) or is producing biased research, they are likely to attempt to dismantle, or at least correct, the institution.
Let’s focus on the first of these concerns, which has obvious implications for the second.
Our biggest concern is how this ideological imbalance on campuses threatens the pursuit of truth in our teaching and research. For a lengthier discussion of our thoughts on this, you can check out our recent book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, as well as our documentary of the same name (available for free on YouTube).
Many academics blur the line between activism and research, letting their leftist beliefs and values skew their work. This has figured into some big claims about systemic racism, police shootings, implicit bias, microaggressions, free markets, sexism, sex differences, transgender issues, single parenthood, IQ, and more. It is, of course, not the case that all or even most of the teaching and research happening on college campuses is corrupted by ideology. But far too many academics—perhaps most notably in fields in the humanities, social sciences, and education—make high-profile claims about social phenomena that go well beyond what the evidence will support and frequently align with left-wing ideologies. This distortion can go on to affect public discourse, workplace practices, and social policy.
As one important example, many academics have gone full-speed ahead in support of a version of gender-affirming care that aligns with leftist ideologies and prerogatives. This would be fine if leftist perspectives were firmly aligned with the best empirical evidence and all other perspectives less so. The problem is that there is a significant amount of research that suggests a weak evidentiary base for gender-affirming care as it is currently practiced in many places in the United States. This research also suggests that too many academics, medical practitioners, and government officials are forgoing standard ethical concerns about minors’ ability to truly consent to practices that may negatively impact things in their future adult lives—such as sexual gratification and fertility—that they may have no ability to conceptualize at their young age.
There are a number of reviews of this research coming out of Europe that readers could examine for more information, such as the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People commissioned by England’s National Health Service in 2020.
The public can see clearly what many of us in academia cannot—that much of the research we produce, research that informs governmental and corporate policies, is either thinly disguised activism or vitiated by the academy’s leftwing bias. As we can see after less than six months of a new presidential administration, this state of affairs has created a political climate highly favorable for those who would do irreparable damage to the institutions we work in and care deeply about.
where do we go from here?
Academia needs much more viewpoint diversity. It is unlikely that this will be willingly accomplished by the faculty, so it is likelier instead that senior leadership and trustees will have to take a greater hand in hiring processes and implement some checks and balances to achieve more diversity.
We also need much higher standards of entry into teaching and research positions in a number of highly activist fields, including sociology. This includes but is not limited to better training for sociology doctoral students in research methods and advanced statistical techniques.
Moreover, we urgently need serious reforms to the peer review process. The gatekeeping positions—such as editorial positions at journals and the peer reviewers themselves—need much more viewpoint diversity. We need to create incentives that ensure that far more meta-analyses and replication attempts are published in top journals. It might make sense to make all anonymous research data and anonymous peer review reports accessible for free online. We could also make the abstracts of all submissions that academic journals reject publicly viewable. That way, it would be easier to detect publication bias.
Finally, we can create new university units specifically designed to welcome heterodox viewpoints. We have created one such space, the Connors Institute, at Shippensburg University where Lawrence Eppard is a faculty member (ConnorsInstitute.org).
We acknowledge that, even if academia gets its act together, there is no guarantee that Republicans will suddenly change course when it comes to their long-standing desire to transform higher education. We believe we should push forward with reforms anyway. The most important reason is that the reforms are necessary and long overdue, independent of Republicans’ actions. But righting the academic ship could also help restore the public’s confidence in it, making it less politically feasible for bad actors to improperly tamper with higher education in America.