Universities: are they too left-wing?

“British universities are largely staffed by the Left,” said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. Perhaps that’s no surprise – an “is the Pope Catholic?” thesis. But what’s new, according to a study published last week, is the question of degree. The report, published by the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, reveals that in 1964, 35% of UK academics supported the Tory party. Today, only 11% do; while 46% support Labour, 22% the Greens, and 9% the Lib Dems. “The once mixed garden of academia has become almost a monoculture.” Many disciplines, particularly the humanities and social sciences, have been heavily infiltrated by the Left, which, “having waited in vain for capitalism to collapse”, branched out “into wider social and cultural issues – race, sexual politics, the use of language”. Today these fields are dominated by “groupthink”, which is “anti-intellectual”, and “bad for universities and students”.

This report is pretty flimsy, said John Morgan in Times Higher Education. Its main evidence for the current political leanings of academics is a small online survey published by this magazine prior to the 2015 election. Even so, “it may be true that academics are generally more slanted towards the Left than they were in previous decades”. It wouldn’t be surprising if one of the few sectors not dominated by the free market attracted “people who don’t want to work in a marketised sector”. It seems unfair to attack “one of the few sanctuaries of left-wing sentiment” remaining to us, said Tom Whyman on Vice.com. You seldom hear people complaining that banking, big business or management consultancy are monopolised by the Right.

But universities are a special case, said The Times. “Higher education has to enshrine the principle of challenge and inquiry. It cannot become a place of comfort zones, of knowledge bubbles inhabited by those who seek only to confirm their own prejudices.” It has become all too obvious that, in recent years, the fear of causing upset or challenging liberal orthodoxies has stifled free speech. “Universities have been rightly careful to respect diversity of gender, class and race.” They should also be “alert to the need for political diversity”.