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I don't support the legislative ABOR--both because I think it would cause more problems than it solves and because I think it misdiagnoses the main problem of the academy, the increasing homogeneity of pedagogical approaches in staffing decisions, and the accompanying, unprecedented, attempt to restrict the range of questions that the academy explores. Yet I don't find the AAUP's approach all that more compelling--under the leadership of Roger Bowen, the organization has turned a blind eye to threats to academic freedom from within the academy, come close to saying (as in the Shortell case) that academic freedom means that academics should be free from anyone outside the academy criticizing their views, however unintellectual those views are, and has maintained that outsiders have no right to know about internal academic affairs.
As part of its anti-Horowitz campaign, the AAUP commissioned a survey on public attitudes toward the academy. A recent AAUP press release trumpeted the findings as largely, though not wholly, a vindication of the organization's strategy. A closer look at the figures, however, and an examination of the questions left unasked, suggests a more complicated picture.
The AAUP hangs its anti-Horowitz conclusion on the findings that 79.4% of the respondents disagree with the position that"the government should control what gets taught in the classroom"; while"more than half of respondents--61.5 percent--say it is acceptable for professors who oppose the war in Iraq to express anti-war views in the classroom."
On the first point, while it's true the AAUP describes the ABOR as calling for government control of what gets caught in the classroom, there's nothing in the ABOR proposals themselves that make that claim, and I'd guess that if the survey simply asked people whether they agreed with ABOR and then read the proposal, the pollsters wouldn't have gotten an 80% negative response. Moreover, it amazes me that 20.6% of the respondents said that they"strongly" or"somewhat" agreed with the propositio that"the government should control what gets taught in the classroom." This is frightening.
On the Iraq point, it's interesting to note that the 61.5% is pretty close to public opinion polls about support for the war, and even this is deceptive: the survey shows that only 29%"strongly" agree with the statement that"it is acceptable for professors who oppose the war in Iraq to express anti-war views in the classroom"; 32.5"somewhat" agree with it--a very different finding. Unasked, moreover, was whether people considered it"acceptable for professors who oppose the war in Afghanistan to express anti-war views in the classroom." I doubt the figure would be 61.5%. Indeed, 59% of the poll's respondents say there's no place in higher education for defenders of Islamic militants.
Left wholly unasked was a simple question:"Should professors regularly use classroom time to express their political views?" Also left unasked were questions about the ideological breakdown of the academy--i.e.,"Is it a problem that surveys show the academy has grown much more ideolgically one-sided in the last generation?"; or"Is it a problem that the ideological breakdown in the academy dramatically differs from the ideological breakdown in society at large?"
I wonder if those questions were left unasked because even the AAUP couldn't have found a good way to spin the likely responses. The organization can feel free (as the survey report does) to note with satisfaction that while Americans view the job of professors as less prestigious than the job of doctors,"professors fare better in terms of prestige than another category of professionals: lawyers." I'm not sure that's cause for reassurance.
We're going in circles here: I think what's missing is that KC could be using the persistence of conservatives in isolated departments and institutions to demonstrate the mechanism by which he believes liberals have isolated and replicated themselves.
I also think you and David are talking past each other: you and KC have explained away some of the persistence by enclaves, but unless you're positing that all conservatives in the academy persist in these enclaves, then you haven't explained the entire problem.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/13/2006
Mmmm, David, not at all. KC's already pointed out that conservatives domination of certain kinds of departments and institutions (business, ag, Hillsdale, Brigham Young, etc) means that academics on the left haven't a significant influence in their replacement.
David Silbey -
6/13/2006
"On David Silbey's point, I never contended that senior faculty who retired were "uniformly replaced with left-wing faculty members."
You're avoiding the issue. Your argument has been that through a whole range of practices, the academy has become more liberal over the last few decades to the detriment of conservative representation. The figures put forward by Dr. McIntyre do not reflect that, and both of your arguments about why those figures are misleading are unconvincing.
For the conservative figures to have remained the same under the reasons you espoused either retiring scholars would have had to have been of roughly the same political makeup as those who replaced them (which would undercut your argument) or departments that tended to be more conservative (business etc) would have to hire _extra_ conservatives to make up the shortfall.
You've got to figure out why the percentage of conservatives remained the same over that period because otherwise your argument is seriously undercut.
Robert KC Johnson -
6/13/2006
I don't harbor any illusions about the quality of education at a place like Liberty or even BYU--institutions that hire along ideological grounds on the right are no better than those that do so on the left. But at least Liberty and BYU don't bother to be hypocritical: they're quite open that they're interested in hiring only profs with certain viewpoints.
On David Silbey's point, I never contended that senior faculty who retired were "uniformly replaced with left-wing faculty members." I would assume that as senior faculty members at a place like Liberty retired, they were replaced by other conservatives. I don't think there are many far-left faculty at Liberty. Nor do I think that there are many far-left faculty in business departments. On the other hand, UCLA history encapsulates the shift in line definitions, toward lines that are more likely to have left or far-left holders.
This discussion illuminates the shortcomings of the Horowitz approach in general. Take, for instance, the DCU survey of 2004 of Duke faculty's political registrations. The most that can be said of figures like a 32-0 registration gap (D-to-R) in the History Department is that it might be suggestive that the department had allocated new lines in such a way to make it very unlikely that conservatives or Repubs would be hired. But nothing more could be said from such data. Likewise, as Michael M. pointed out above, there are so many possible explanations for the data here, it's hard to show any single firm explanation.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/12/2006
I don't see how that affects the discussion of the persistance of a substantial block of conservatives in academe at all.
Jonathan Dresner -
6/12/2006
Well, it raises other questions, like "what's with the conservative orthodoxy in those departments and how does it degrade teaching?"
Ralph E. Luker -
6/12/2006
David, Since KC's already pointed out that there are certain kinds of departments and institutions in which academic on the liberal/left would have little influence over appointments, doesn't that already overcome your objection?
David Silbey -
6/12/2006
"The relatively constant number of self-identified conservatives. While at first this might seem counterintuitive, I'm not sure it is."
No, your theory is in serious trouble with that number. You point it out yourself--the people in 1989 are not the same people as in 2004-05. A whole cadre of senior scholars retired during the period. If--as your argument postulates--they were uniformly replaced with left-wing faculty members, then they would have had to be almost entirely left-wing themselves, or the conservative percentage would have dropped. That doesn't pass the sniff test, and I'd need some really hard evidence to believe it.
If they were conservatives being replaced by liberals then you have to increase the conservative hires elsewhere. Have the conservative leaning departments increased substantially in the same period? You need solid numbers showing that to be true.
I'm skeptical of either, and I think that you're going to need to show some serious proof to deal with the difficulty that Dr. McIntyre's figures give you. Taking glib potshots at UCLA isn't sufficient.
Michael McIntyre -
6/12/2006
KC,You're right that we'll need more fine-grained data to do more than speculate. I'm not sure whether or not HERI makes their data available in a format that allows cross-tabulation. In any case, even if they do, I don't have the time or expertise to do the job.
A change in the composition of faculty lines would certainly matter. However, my bet is that the most important shift in faculty lines has not been within the liberal arts, but from liberal arts and sciences to vocational degrees, exactly the kind you think would be more likely to be staffed by non-liberals.
And of course self-identification on a linear scale poses all sorts of problems. Different people have different perceptions of where the center lies. What counts as "the center" changes over time. And most importantly, this one-dimensional measure ill captures people's multi-dimensional politics. Lots of folks on the PoMo radical chic "left" turned out to be downright scabs when "their" graduate students tried to organize unions. And lots more are willing to turn a blind eye to the way their salaries are subsidized by contingent academic labor.
All of which is only to say that gettting a real picture of the politics of academics would be awfully damned complicated, and would require a research design that would sensitize us to disconfirming evidence.
Oscar Chamberlain -
6/12/2006
"that ideological one-sidedness has increased in the past generation."
In all honesty, I don't know of any studies that show (as opposed to suggest) that either. Perhaps you do.
Robert KC Johnson -
6/12/2006
Michael,
I second Ralph's thanks for this data.
I'd suggest, though, that it's almost entirely consistent with my basic hypothesis--which is not that ideological screening occurs in hiring committees, but that there's been a massive, and continuing, shift in types of lines staffed that has had a secondary effect of driving the academy to the left.
Two explanatory caveats;
1.) The relatively constant number of self-identified conservatives. While at first this might seem counterintuitive, I'm not sure it is. Two reasons: (1) There are certain types of departments, mostly vocational ones like business or agriculture, that because of their nature are likely to be staffed by conservatives, just as, say, social work is likely to be staffed by people on the left; (2) There's a contingent of schools, some religious (the Oral Roberts and BYU's of the world), some ideological (Hilldale) that are quite open in their demand to be staffed by conservatives.
So on your question, "Wouldn't vengeful liberals go after conservatives before they went after moderates?" Perhaps--but liberals really aren't in a position to go after people in these areas.
They are in a position to redefine lines after people retire to make it far less likely that a "moderate" will be hired. Take the case of my favorite target, the UCLA History Department, as a good example.
2.) On the question of "liberal" vs. "far left," we have the question of self-identification. According to the data, it's Far left - 7.9%; Liberal - 43.4%. But how many of those 43.4% would be considered "far left" by anyone outside the academy.
A couple of examples. Elizabeth Chin--the Duke visiting prof who dismissed her class so they could watch the ant-lacrosse rally--describes herself in her Chronicle piece as a "good liberal." Yet I suspect that just about everyone outside the academy would consider her, quite correctly, on the far left. Or Tim (religious people are "moral retards" Shortell, who publicly claimed that he was chastised for his anti-Bush "liberal" beliefs--yet again, holds views most would consider on the far left.
It's possible, of course, that your hypothesis is correct--ie, that moderate academics simply moved to the left as they aged. But that's a most unusual pattern--people don't generally move leftward, in substantial numbers, as they get older. And it's important to recall that the people being identified in 2004 aren't entirely the same group as 1989--we have 15 years of retirements, and 15 yrs of new hires.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/12/2006
very interesting data, Michael.
Michael McIntyre -
6/12/2006
I looked up the HERI data for 1989-90, 2001-2, and 2004-5. (It's all available on the Chronicle's website if you dig a little). There has been a polarization on campus since 1989, with a large increase in faculty members identifying as "liberal" or "far left". However, that has not come at the expense of faculty members identifying as "conservative" or "far right". It has come entirely from a reduction in the number of faculty members identifying as "middle of the road". Here are the numbers:
1989-90:
Far left - 4.9%
Liberal - 36.8%
Middle of the Road - 40.3%
Conservative - 17.8%
Far Right - 0.4%
2004-5:
Far left - 7.9%
Liberal - 43.4%
Middle of the Road - 29.2%
Conservative - 18.8%
Far Right - 0.7%
For the sake of comparison, let's look at HERI's political profile of fall 2004 freshmen:
Far Left - 3.4%
Liberal - 26.1%
Middle of the Road - 46.4%
Conservative - 21.9%
Far Right - 2.2%
There's certainly a disparity there, but the really large gap isn't between the percentage of conservative freshmen and the percentage of conservative faculty (21.9% vs. 18.8%). The biggest gap was between moderate freshmen and moderate faculty (46.4% vs. 29.2%).
For further comparison, we can create a Likert scale for the faculty and freshmen, with far left = 1 and far right = 5. The medians for 2004 then become:
Freshmen: 2.934
Faculty: 2.61
To sum up:
(1) There are as many conservative faculty members today as there were 15 years ago.
(2) The median faculty member leans a little to the left, but is closer to moderate than liberal.
(3) The median freshman is also leans a little to the left, but VERY little.
(4) The distance between the median freshman and the median faculty member is small: 0.324 on a five-point scale.
(5) The big unexplained change - "What happened to the moderates"? Here are three possible explanations:
(a) Liberal-dominated faculty are increasingly unwilling to hire moderates. This doesn't seem very plausible, because there seems to be no trend towards fewer conservatives. Wouldn't vengeful liberals go after conservatives before they went after moderates?
(b) The supply of new Ph.D.'s is very highly polarized, with fewer and fewer moderates. But this shift would have to be implausibly large to account for the whole shift.
(c) There has been a large shift in ideological identification among faculty as a whole, with former moderates now identifying as liberals. My bet is that this explains most of the change. I'm not sure I have a good explanation for why moderates have moved left, though.
Hiram Hover -
6/12/2006
The interesting and important questions in this debate aren't really amendable to popular opinion polling, and the questions you propose aren't very simple at all.
More important than knowing whether people think ideological "one-sidedness" is a problem, for example, would be knowing why they thought so. My guess is that many would think it's a problem for all sorts of spurious or questionable reasons: because of a knee-jerk preference for balance in all things, in a PBS Newshour sort of way; because they assume that one-sidedness in current political affiliation (which is really what you mean) necessarily dictates one-sidedness in how we study or teach our subject matter (whatever exactly "one-sidedness" would mean there).
A further thought: Jonathan points out the problem with one word--"regularly"--in your not-so-simple question. I'll add that the phrase "political views" has plenty of difficulties as well, since it seems to be premised on a dichotomy between "scholarly" and "political." I suppose you could revise it to "views about extraneous events and issues," which doesn't solve the problem, since it raises the question of what's extraneous and who gets to decide (we can easily agree at the extremes--it's extraneous to interrupt a lecture on photosynthesis to declare one's opposition to the war in Iraq--but things falling short of that might be more difficult.)
In any event, my point isn't to quibble about wording and questions not asked, but to emphasize that these polls are only good for so much. One thing the AAUP poll does demonstrate is that--for better of worse--many people approach higher education primarily as consumers. They're very concerned about the price of the product, but generally satisfied with its quality.
One final thing I noticed, digging through their findings: concern about political bias among professors was generally on par with concern about campus athletics getting too much focus, and was far exceeded--by roughly two-fold--by concern about binge drinking on campus. Perhaps there's a lesson there for Duke?
Robert KC Johnson -
6/12/2006
This is precisely my point: any of the unasked questions I mentioned would yield overwhelming "agree" responses, just as the AAUP's question on whether the government should control what's said in the classroom. It's easy to frame loaded questions, as the AAUP's survey has done, to get the answers you want.
As to the questions on the ideological disparities: I'm unaware of any surveys done that don't suggest (a) the ideological gap in the academy is far wider than the ideological divide nation-wide; and (b) that ideological one-sidedness has increased in the past generation.
Sherman Jay Dorn -
6/12/2006
Wording survey questions appropriately is a problem, as Dresner points out. Your other proposed questions aren't better than the AAUP's, I think: "Is it a problem that surveys show the academy has grown much more ideolgically one-sided in the last generation?" is a loaded question, in part because I suspect we wouldn't agree on what "much more" or "generation" means. Similarly, "Is it a problem that the ideological breakdown in the academy dramatically differs from the ideological breakdown in society at large?" is a loaded question, unless it's matched with questions that replace "the academy" with "Wall Street," "Kansas," "gated suburban developments," "doctors," "Congress," etc.
Jonathan Dresner -
6/11/2006
"Should professors regularly use classroom time to express their political views?"
"regularly" is the loaded word here: it gets you into questions of quantity and situation that's too unclear. The other questions hinge on accepting premises that the AAUP (myself, too) don't accept.
