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Is Princeton's Faculty too Liberal?

This week Mr. Wiener is visiting Princeton, his alma mater, to discuss his latest book. He took the opportunity to address the question of bias in academia.

Is the Princeton faculty too liberal? Oped columnist (and Princeton Ph.D.) George F. Will complains that faculties like Princeton's are "intellectual versions of one-party nations;" David Horowitz of FrontPageMag.com has complained about what he calls "the atmosphere of intolerance and hate towards conservatives" at Princeton.

How liberal is the Princeton faculty? The Center for Democratic Politics has collected and published the 2004 campaign contribution data on its website www.opensecrets.org. Now we know: Princeton employees gave $252,000 to the Democrats in 2004 and only $22,000 to the Republicans. That's 92 percent Democratic. The figure is for "employees," which of course includes staff as well as faculty. It's not perfect, but it's the best we have.

Princeton is not very different from other elite colleges and universities — Yale contributions were 93 percent Democratic, Columbia was 90 percent and Harvard was on top at 96 percent Democratic.

The absence of Republicans on the faculty is nothing new. Back in 1951, a student at Yale wrote a book complaining that, while the school derived its "moral and financial support from Christian individualists," the faculty worked on "persuading the sons of those supporters to be atheistic socialists." The student was William F. Buckley Jr., and his book was God and Man at Yale. His solution was straightforward: fire the leftists and replace them with God-fearing Republicans.

Today things have changed. In the fifties, the complaint was that Ivy League faculties were full of communists and socialists; today the complaint is that they are full of Democrats. The definition of the unacceptable has shifted to the right.

The Republicans' proposed solution, as Russell Jacoby argues in the Nation magazine (April 4), involves their embrace of doctrines they have denounced for decades: academic freedom and affirmative action. "Academic freedom" until now has meant protecting professors with politically unpopular ideas from those who would get rid of them — mostly those on the right, like Buckley. Now conservative activists are arguing that "academic freedom" requires protection of conservative students from liberal professors. They also propose something like affirmative action to increase the representation of Republicans on the faculty at schools like Princeton.

This campaign is being led by David Horowitz, the guy who placed an ad in the Daily Princetonian in 2001 attacking reparations for slavery — and then refused to pay for it because the paper ran an editorial criticizing him. As the result of his current efforts, an "Academic Bill of Rights" has been introduced by Republicans in more than a dozen state legislatures. It has many provisions that sound benign: The declared goal is a faculty that should "welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions." But does this "diversity" of faculty voices on "unsettled questions" require giving creationism equal time with evolution in the biology department? Two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught along with evolution. Should Princeton hire more professors who oppose abortion? Forty percent of Americans say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

The idea that faculty opinion should mirror "unsettled questions" should also require affirmative action for fundamentalist Christians — who make up 30 to 40 percent of the American population, but are barely represented among Princeton professors. And what about the 40 percent of Americans who say they attend church regularly? Until the 1960s, Princeton had a "chapel rule" requiring church attendance of all students. Maybe now we need a new chapel rule — this time, for the faculty — requiring that 40 percent show up for mandatory prayer every Sunday morning: But no Muslims, please!

Conservative activists want affirmative action to increase the number of Republican professors at places like Princeton, but for some reason they are not advocating affirmative action to bring more women or minorities to the faculty, or to bring more Democrats to the faculties at West Point, Pepperdine or the University of Chicago Economics Department. Maybe "balance" isn't their highest goal.

It's true that the faculty at Princeton, like most schools, is strongly Democratic. Why is that? Maybe it's because liberals are more interested in careers in academia, while conservatives are more interested in careers in business. Is that bad? There's no good evidence that Republican students are graded down or otherwise punished or discriminated against by professors who are Democrats. Faculty hiring at Princeton — and everywhere else — should be based on academic qualifications rather than on political criteria.

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This article was first published by the Daily Princetonian and is reprinted with permission.