New Voices:
U.S. colleges lack diversity of viewpoints.
Diversity. Race, sex, orientation, gender, religion, class, ability status. For all the excellent progress that institutes of higher education have made in diversity and inclusion, one critical area has stalled and slid into reverse. What do many college campuses lack? A diversity of viewpoints. America’s university faculty have, on average, become more homogeneous in their political makeup than ever before. Although there are exceptions, this well-documented phenomenon is broad enough that it should concern anyone regardless of partisan leanings.
Starting about the time of the new millennium, the faculty working in higher education took a hard left turn.
Few people are surprised to discover that the majority of college professors self-identify as liberal or progressive. Progressivism has long thrived in education and theories abound as to why. Some people believe that it is a process of self-selection arguing that conservatives, who tend to opt for professional fields outside of academia, skew the proportion of right-wingers lecturing in classrooms. Others say that education itself has a liberalizing effect on one’s politics, meaning that even if liberals and conservatives choose academic careers in similar numbers, a lifetime of working in schools gradually draws them toward the liberal end of the spectrum.
Whatever the cause may be, it is not a problem in itself that the political ideology of faculty does not represent the public-at-large with perfect proportionality. What is a problem, however, is the depth of this intellectual ravine, and schools should mind the gap. Ivy League institutions are among the worst offenders, with Brown University coming in at a 60:1 liberal-toconservative ratio.
Across all disciplines, the percentage of academics who identified as conservative in the past two decades held steady around 15 percent, dipping slightly in the Obama years. In the social sciences and humanities — the very disciplines where blind spots of political ideology matter most — the percentage of professors identifying as conservative plummets to an abysmal 4 percent. Over the same period, the proportion of self-identified liberals grew significantly. Left-leaning academics increased by nearly one half, going from a self-reported 40 percent to 60 percent of faculty, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. It should not be surprising at all if small-to-medium sized departments, university panels or leadership committees cannot find a single conservative faculty representative at all.
Of course, some people will make a small-minded objection: “Who cares if conservative voices are drowned out?” This bigoted attitude is unfortunate. If people who are legitimately concerned with discrimination issues surrounding race, sex and the more traditionally marginalized eagerly turn a blind eye to diversity of thought, then the rest of us must rise to something higher.
Valencia College sets a beautiful example by celebrating diversity of all types — including intellectual diversity. Facultysponsored clubs bridge a wide range of ideologies, students and staff know it’s OK not to agree when talking politics, and professional development stresses the importance of dialogue over entrenched political views. It makes for a healthier learning environment and fairly reflects the diversity of the Orlando community.
Still, not all schools live up to this standard and they would be well served to combat the paucity of viewpoints. Academic institutions that fail to vigorously interrogate their ideas will fail to produce new and better ones. Their students will be systematically exposed to the same assumptions over and over, even against the best efforts of their instructors to remain impartial. Research in the social sciences and humanities, which can tell us so much about human meaning and behavior, risks suffocating under mountains of unchallenged dogma.
State legislators in North Carolina and Iowa recently introduced legislation designed to preserve a level of balance in the political leanings of college professors. These terrible proposals, effectively affirmative action quotas based on ideology, were thankfully tabled before becoming law. Good riddance. We don’t need draconian policies that reward people for thinking a certain way. What we need is to be more accepting when they don’t.