With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

KC Johnson: Complains about lack of ideological diversity in University of Iowa's History Department

Professors in the University of Iowa's History Department have had some unusual explanations about the department's partisan imbalance. Several weeks ago, for instance, department chairman Colin Gordon cited the registration figures for Johnson County (home of the University) to account for the fact that his department has no registered Republicans. The University, I assume, has a policy of actively recruiting its membership from beyond county lines.

One of Gordon's colleagues, History professor Sarah Hanley, was quoted in a recent article by the Iowa City Press-Citizen, which examined registration figures for all academic departments at the University of Iowa. The paper discovered that the University hosts 21 departments of 10 or more professors with one or fewer registered Republicans in their ranks. Seven of these departments (including History) had no registered Republicans.

The statistics: 1775 University of Iowa professors were registered in Johnson County, where the University is located. Of that total, 66.1 percent were registered Democrats, 22.4 registered without party affiliation, and 11.5 percent were registered Republicans.

As I've noted before, partisan affiliation is a crude measurement to determine bias in personnel patterns. Yet a gap of 55 percent between the two parties, along with a multitude of departments that don't even have at least one representative of both major parties, seems somewhat troubling. At the least, it should raise questions as to whether departments at the University have devised lines in such a way to skew the faculty so far to one side politically.

P-C reporter Brian Morelli interviewed one History professor who demonstrated no concern with such matters. Sarah Hanley dismissed suggestions that the department is skewed. Said she,"I have great faith in the integrity of faculty members to not put political views on students. I just had a Western civilization class where I could have hammered away on politics, but I didn't. In the history department, you don't talk about politics."

It's reassuring to know that Hanley behaved professionally in her last class. That she did so, however, isn't much of an explanation one way or the other as to whether the department has tailored lines in such a way that its membership has skewed so far to one side.

According to Morelli, Hanley also mirrored Gordon's assertion on why the department had no Republicans—the breakdown of their county's registration figures."To participate politically here, you have to be a Democrat, she said, noting that most local public officials are Democrats."

This is an odd claim indeed: it would suggest, of course, that History Departments in Republican counties (say, Arizona State University) would be likely to include no Democrats among their ranks. It also suggests an odd view of politics: Hanley appears to believe that people develop an abstract desire to participate politically, and then choose the party based on the likelihood of success.

(And the numbers from Hanley's own county don't quite support her argument: while UI profs registered in Johnson County have a Democrat/Republican ratio of 66.1/11.5, or roughly 6-to-1, the county ratio is 43.9/19.4, or around 2.25/1. Why faculty residents of Johnson County would be so much more Democratic than everyone else in Johnson County Hanley didn't say.)

Hanley further told Morelli that ideological one-sidedness wasn't a problem for her—or any—academic department."I don't think," said she,"there is a downside." Hanley added a bizarre analogy:"If it is a downside, then it would be a downside to have states to be so-called blue or so-called red. It would be casting a pall on the democratic system where people are free to choose."

I can only hope that Hanley offers a more sophisticated interpretation of politics in her classes.

Read entire article at Robert KC Johnson at HNN blog, Cliopatria