Misplaced Pages

Political views of American academics

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tryptofish (talk | contribs) at 19:09, 6 June 2018 (→Ford Foundation study: expand with another source). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 19:09, 6 June 2018 by Tryptofish (talk | contribs) (→Ford Foundation study: expand with another source)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
This article may require cleanup to meet Misplaced Pages's quality standards. The specific problem is: Needs much better organization and possibly a trim. Please help improve this article if you can. (May 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (May 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The political views of American academics have been investigated in various studies published since the 1950s. The studies offer a wide range of interpretations of their findings, which are an ongoing topic of discussion among scholars and in popular media.

Anti-communism and loyalty oaths

During the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy used the power of the United States government to enforce anti-Communism. Although they focused largely on persons in the government and entertainment, they also targeted university faculty. Members of the American Legion began accusing university faculty of being Communists. Universities responded by banning left-wing student groups and Communist speakers. The House Un-American Activities Committee summoned faculty members from the University of Washington, and three tenured faculty members were fired in 1949. Following passage of the Levering Act, faculty at the University of California were required to sign loyalty oaths. McCarthy's Senate committee investigated 18 faculty members at Sarah Lawrence College, some of whom were pressured to resign. According to historian Ellen Schrecker, "it is very clear that an academic blacklist was in operation during the McCarthy era", and numerous faculty members across the US, both tenured and untenured, lost their jobs. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a secret counterintelligence program in libraries, and in 1970 Hoover sent an open letter to US college students, advising them to reject leftist politics.

Research

Ford Foundation study

In 1955, Robert Maynard Hutchins led an effort within the Ford Foundation to document and analyze the effects of McCarthyism on academic freedom. He commissioned sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to conduct a study of university faculty in the United States, and the results were published by Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens in a book, The Academic Mind. As part of a survey of faculty views about Communism and free speech, they asked professors of social science a large number of questions, and found that approximately 2,500 of these faculty members had been visited by the FBI. They also included a few questions about political party affiliations and recent voting patterns, and reported that there were more Democrats than Republicans, 47% to 16%. According to sociologist Neil Gross, the study was significant because it was the first effort to poll university faculty specifically about their political views.

Carnegie Commission on Higher Education

According to Gross, the Lazarsfeld and Thielens study had examined only a small population of faculty members, but a second study, conducted in 1969 on behalf of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, was the first to be performed with a large survey population, extensive questions about political views, and highly rigorous analytic methods. The study was conducted by political scientists and sociologists Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset, who collected data from more than 60,000 academics in all fields of study, at 303 colleges and universities, and who published their complete results in 1975 in the book The Divided Academy.

Ladd and Lipset found that about 46% of professors described themselves as liberal, 27% described themselves as moderates, and 28% described themselves as conservative. They also reported that faculty in the humanities and social sciences were the most liberal, while those in "applied professional schools such as nursing and home economics" and in agriculture were the most conservative. Younger faculty tended to be more liberal than older faculty, and faculty across the political spectrum tended to disapprove of the student activism of the 1960s.

Later studies

Over subsequent decades, multiple other studies of academics in the US were conducted. They have generally reported numbers roughly similar to the Ladd and Lipset study, with some small shifts between liberal and conservative over time. Many of these studies have been plagued by methodological problems. Neil Gross wrote that multiple studies had been conducted by conservatives and libertarians who wanted "to document how far left academia had veered in order to mount a more effective critique of it", and who, in doing so, made "a number of poor methodological choices, as well as leaps of logic, because of their strong political commitments." Gross and Solon Simmons concluded that, as of 2014, the numbers were approximately 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative, across a broad population of university faculty.

Effects on students

Nonetheless, reports that liberals significantly outnumbered conservatives became widely repeated in the popular press. Politically conservative authors have long argued that liberal faculty members outnumber conservative ones, and indoctrinate their students with liberal views, and recent research has focused increasingly on the extent of faculty influence on student beliefs. 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. In fact, however, there is little evidence 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."

Effects on faculty

Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner also found in 2010 that 33% of conservative faculty say they are "very satisfied" with their careers, while 24% of liberal faculty say so. Over 90% of Republican-voting professors said that they would still become professors if they could do it all over again. The authors concluded that, although such numbers are not definitive as to how faculty members feel that they have been treated, they provide some evidence against the idea that conservative faculty members are systematically discriminated against. Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn interviewed 153 conservative professors for their 2016 book Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University. The authors wrote that these professors sometimes have to use "coping strategies that gays and lesbians have used in the military and other inhospitable work environments" in order to hide their political identity. Shields stated his view that the populist right may overstate the bias that does exist and that conservatives can succeed using mechanisms like academic tenure to protect their freedom. One outcome of these controversies was the creation in 2015 of the Heterodox Academy, a bipartisan organization of professors seeking to increase the acceptance of diverse political viewpoints in academic discourse.

Woessner and Kelly-Woessner also examined what might have given rise to the differences in the numbers of liberals and conservatives. They looked at the choices made by undergraduate students when planning future careers. They found that there were no differences in intellectual ability between conservative and liberal students, but that liberal students were significantly more likely to choose to pursue PhD degrees and academic careers, whereas conservative students of identical academic accomplishments were more likely to pursue business careers. They concluded that the greater numbers of liberal than conservative professors could be accounted for by self-selection in career paths, rather than by bias in hiring or promotion.

See also

References

  1. ^ Schrecker, Ellen (October 7, 1999). "Political Tests for Professors: Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Years". University of California at Berkeley. Retrieved June 6, 2018.
  2. ^ "Sarah Lawrence Under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Era". Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Retrieved June 6, 2018.
  3. ^ Fox, Renee C. (2017). Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology. Routledge.
  4. Hoover, J. Edgar (September 21, 1970). "An Open Letter to College Students" (PDF). Nixon Library. Retrieved June 6, 2018.
  5. ^ Gross, Neil (2013). Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674059092.
  6. Paul Félix Lazarsfeld; Wagner Thielens; Columbia University. Bureau of Applied Social Research (1958). The academic mind: social scientists in a time of crisis. Free Press.
  7. ^ Everett Carll Jr Ladd; Seymour Martin Lipset (1 January 1975). The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-010112-8.
  8. Hamilton, Richard F., and Lowell L. Hargens. "The Politics of the Professors: Self-Identifications, 1969–1984." Social Forces 71, no. 3 (1993): 603–27. doi:10.2307/2579887.
  9. Linda J. Sax et. al., The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 1998–1999 HERI Faculty Survey (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, 1999). Alexander W. Astin et. al., The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 1989–1990 HERI Faculty Survey (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, 1990).
  10. Klein, Daniel B. (September 2011). "Academe's House Divided". Academic Questions. 24 (3): 65+. doi:10.1007/s12129-011-9240-0.
  11. Stanley Rothman, April Kelly (2011). The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education, Woessner, Matthew Woessner, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
  12. Duarte, José L.; Crawford, Jarret T.; Stern, Charlotta; Haidt, Jonathan; Jussim, Lee; Tetlock, Philip E. (2015) . "Political diversity will improve social psychological science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 38 (e130). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14000430. PMID 25036715.
  13. Rothman, Stanley; Lichter, S. Robert; Nevitte, Neil (2005), "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty" (PDF), The Forum, 3 (1), doi:10.2202/1540-8884.1067
  14. Ames, Barry; Barker, David C.; Bonneau, Chris W.; Carman, Chris J. (12 September 2007). "Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women: A Response to" – via papers.ssrn.com.
  15. ^ "Five myths about liberal academia", Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011 Washington Post
  16. Zipp, John F., and Rudy Fenwick. "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors." The Public Opinion Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2006): 304–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3843984.
  17. Jacoby, Russell (April 1, 2016). "Academe Is Overrun by Liberals. So What?". The Chronicle Review. The Chronicle of Higher Education. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |subscription= ignored (|url-access= suggested) (help)
  18. Neil Gross; Solon Simmons (29 May 2014). Professors and Their Politics. JHU Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-1334-1.
  19. ^ Sweeney, Chris (December 20, 2016). "How Liberal Professors Are Ruining College". Boston Magazine. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
  20. ^ Mariani, Mack D., and Gordon J. Hewitt. "Indoctrination U.? Faculty Ideology and Changes in Student Political Orientation." PS: Political Science and Politics 41, no. 4 (2008): 773–83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20452310.
  21. Yancey, George. "Recalibrating Academic Bias." Academic Questions 25, no. 2 (2012): 267–78.
  22. ^ Stanley Rothman; April Kelly-Woessner; Matthew Woessner (16 December 2010). The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4422-0808-7.
  23. Jon A. Shields; Joshua M. Dunn Sr. (March 2016). "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University". Oxford Scholarship Online. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199863051.001.0001. OCLC 965380745. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  24. Green, Emma (April 30, 2016). "Do American Universities Discriminate Against Conservatives?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
  25. Lerner, Maura (April 24, 2018). "Nurturing a new diversity on campus: 'Diversity of thought'". Star Tribune. Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  26. Woessner, Matthew; Kelly-Woessner, April (2009). "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates". In Marranto, Robert; Redding, Richard E.; Hess, Frederick M. (eds.). The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope, and Reforms. The AEI Press. ISBN 9780844743172.
Categories: