Liberal bias in academia refers to the perception that academia have liberal bias in the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and other Western countries, that college and university professors are disproportionately liberal compared to the general population. The extent and causes of this perceived bias have been the subject of intensive debate in both academic literature and the popular press.
Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
Early research
Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, were the first scholars to conduct a systematic survey of the politics of American university professors. The research was commissioned by an arm of the Ford Foundation in 1955 as a response to McCarthyism, and focused solely on social scientists. Lazarsfeld found that just 16% of the social scientists he surveyed self-identified as Republicans, while 47% self-identified as Democrats. 67% said they were "more liberal" than the average person in the community where they worked.
A second major survey was conducted in 1969 by Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset. Funded by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Ladd and Lipset's study surveyed more than 60,000 respondents at 303 colleges and universities, and was not limited to those working in the social sciences. Ladd and Lipset found that about 46% of professors described themselves as liberal, 27% described themselves as moderates, and 28% described themselves as conservative - at a time when only 20% of the American public - but 45% of college students - described themselves as liberal or left wing.
Building on Ladd and Lipset's study, the Carnegie Commission and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching funded follow-up surveys in 1975, 1984, and 1989, but these surveys asked only a single, simple question about professor's political beliefs, and the wording of the question changed after 1984, making it difficult for researchers to meaningfully compare the surveys after that date.
In 1993, Richard F. Hamilton and Lowell L. Hargrens analyzed data from the 1969, 1975, and 1984 Carnegie surveys, and found that despite considerable public debate over a perceived liberal bias in academia, there was little evidence that academia was becoming increasingly liberal. Rather, they found that the number of professors who self-identified as leftists was "fairly constant" throughout the period between 1969 and 1984, while "the overall or not tendency...was towards greater conservatism." In 1984, 39.5% of the professors surveyed described themselves as liberal or left, while 26.6% described themselves as moderate and 33.8% described themselves as conservative or strong conservative.
Hamilton and Hargrens wrote that they were "unable to use" Carnegie data from 1989, because the wording of the survey's questions had been altered, but political scientist Neil Gross has used later Carnegie data to suggest that the movement to the right which Hamilton and Lowell detected was a temporary one. According to Gross, the Carnegie surveys suggest that the number of academics identifying as liberals increased by 8% between 1969 and 1997, while the number who self-identified as conservatives increased by only 1%. According to the 1997 survey, 57% of professors described themselves as liberal, 20% described themselves as moderate, and 24% described themselves as conservatives.
Beginning in 1989, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has conducted a survey of American university faculty every three years. Like the later Carnegie studies, these surveys do not focus on professor's' political beliefs, and contain only a single question about professors' politics. The HERI survey showed negligible change in the number of professors who described themselves as far left or liberal between 1989 and 1998, with approximately 45% of those surveyed self-identifying as liberals or far left.
Recent research
According to political scientist Neil Gross, much of the research on the political beliefs of college and university professors that has been published since the late 1990s has been conducted by outspoken conservative and libertarian intellectuals, whose primary goal was "to document how far left academia had veered in order to mount a more effective critique of it." Many of these researchers, according to Gross, have made "a number of poor methodological choices, as well as leaps of logic, because of their strong political commitments." In another major work co-authored with Solon Simmons, Gross and Simmons have written that there has been "a concerted mobilization on the part of conservative activists, think tanks, foundations and professors aimed at challenging so-called liberal hegemony in higher education" since the late 1990s. Much recent research into the issue, according to Simmons and Gross, "has been beholden to this program."
Similarly, sociologists John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick have taken issue with conservative scholars and writers' argument that "an overwhelmingly left and liberal faculty has taken over American colleges and universities," arguing that while such claims had gained significant attention, "there have been very few systemic, scholarly analyses of the topic." Criticizing other scholars' selective use of unrepresentative data and poor survey methodologies, Zipp and Fenwick concluded that while liberals certainly outnumbered conservatives in academia, there was no reliable evidence for the popular conservative claim that there were "seven to ten liberals for every conservative on campus."
A 1999 survey conducted by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte found that professors with liberal socio-political views outnumbered their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 5 to 1 in the United States, with the former constituting 72% of the faculty body and the later representing 15%. The study was criticized by political scientists Barry Ames, David C. Barker, Chris W. Bonneau, and Christopher J. Carman, who argued that it was "plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence." Rothman, Licther and Nevitte's study was later revealed to have contained a coding error, which exaggerated the percentage of professors holding liberal views by 12%.
Political scientists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons carried out a survey of professorial politics which was designed to bring the subject back into the "mainstream of sociological inquiry" and to avoid the methodological problems which had plagued other studies during the early 2000s. Introducing their findings, Gross and Simmons specifically singled out recent studies by Gary A. Tobin and Aryeh K. Weinberg, Daniel Klein and Andrew Western, and Rothman, Licther and Nevitte study for methodological problems that "might be traceable to a desire to score political points." Known as the Politics of the American Professoriate (PAP) survey, Gross and Simmons' survey was unlike other recent studies in that it received a relatively high response rate of 51%, corrected for response bias, and surveyed a large sample of nearly 3.000 scholars from representative institutions. Gross and Simmons concluded that 44% of their respondents could be classified as liberals, 46% as moderates, and 9 percent as conservatives. In terms of party affiliation, 51% of respondents were Democrats, 36 percent were Independents, and 14 percent were Republicans. Gross and Simmons compared this data to the Gallup poll, which found that 34% of Americans were Democrats, 34% were independents, and 30% were Republicans in 2006, concluding that "Democrats are doing better inside than outside academe by a margin of about 16 percentage points."
In a later, 2013 study, Gross compared Rothman, Licther, and Nevitte's corrected data, data collected by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) in 2004 and 2005, and Gross and Simmons' PAP survey, noting that all three data sets suggested that between 50 and 60 percent of professors were liberal, and that it was a "reasonable conclusion" that "between 50% and 60% of academics fall somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum." As Gross notes, this sets the American professoriate apart from the American public, approximately 17% of whom are leftist or liberal. While suggesting that it was hopeless to deny that professors were, as a whole, a "liberal lot," however, Gross criticized conservative writers and researchers' tendency to exaggerate liberal bias, criticizing research such as Rothman, Licther, and Nevitte's as using "questionable methodologies," and "as much advocacy as scholarship." According to Gross, it is important to recognize that the academics classified as liberal in surveys hold a wide range of views, that their ranks include many independents and moderates, and that truly radical professors make up less than eight percent of the professoriate.
Theories and explanations
In recent years, the focus of academic debates over faculty ideology has shifted away from the question of whether college and university faculty tend to be disproportionately liberal (as evidence of this has mounted) and onto the question of what the causes and consequences are for this imbalance. In general, the debate over causes has been between two broad explanations; one which argues that academia has an ideological bias which discriminates against conservatives, and one which suggests that conservatives tend to self-select out of academia, and prefer other professions.
Surveys conducted by the Xavier University in Ohio have provided a different explanation of the prevalence of liberal academics in colleges. The survey outlined the Self-Selection Hypothesis, which proposed that conservatives were less likely to pursue careers in academia due to a combination of personal preference and belief that they would face more challenges in achieving academic success due in a progressive-dominated field. The study found that conservatives aspired to get into higher-paying jobs, whilst liberals were more likely to be affiliated with community service occupations and were less influenced by monetary gratification.
Implications
The prevalence of progressive professors in institutions of higher education, some argue, has created an environment that prioritizes political correctness above truthfulness. A report by the California Association of Scholars, put together in 2012 for the UCLA, argues that the lack of balance between liberal and conservative viewpoints has contributed to a culture that espouses socio-cultural and political apologists, whilst marginalizing those with center-right viewpoints.
Politically conservative authors have long argued that liberal faculty members outnumber conservative ones, and indoctrinate their students with liberal views. William F. Buckley made this argument in his 1951 work, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," and works such has Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals have made similar arguments. There is little evidence, however, that the political orientation of faculty members affects the political attitudes of their students. A 2008 study by Mack D. Mariani and Gordon J. Hewitt found no evidence that faculty ideology was "associated with changes in students' ideological orientation" and concluded that students at more liberal schools "were not statistically more likely to move to the left" than students at other institutions. Similarly, Staneley Rothman, April Kelly-Woessner, and Mathew Wossner found in 2010 that students' "aggregate attitudes do not appear to vary much between their first and final years," and wrote that this "raises some questions about charges that campuses politically indoctrinate students."
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