The Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed: Trends in Faculty Political Ideology, 1969-Present.

• Author: Magness, Phillip W.

The archetype of the "radical tenured college professor" has long had an empirical basis in political surveys of academics. Since the earliest measures in the 1960s, the modal college professor has sat to the political left of the American public. Until very recently, however, this overall skew obscured an underlying stability in the political composition of faculty. Between 1969 and 1998, the share of faculty identifying as "liberal" or "far-left" shifted only a tenth of a percentage point, from 44.7 percent to 44.8 percent.

Beginning with the next survey, in 2001, however, faculty opinion took a hard left turn such that professors on the political left are now approaching a supermajority in the academy (see figure 1). Although faculty opinions developed a pronounced political skew in the past two decades, student views have not followed suit. Survey data for incoming first-year students shows long-term fluctuations on the left and right but also a clear plurality at the political center (Higher Education Research Institute 1970-present). As a result, a widening political gap now exists between professors and the students they teach, with the latter exhibiting a more representative slice of the general public.

These trends point to the imperiled state of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Although higher ed still draws primarily from the general public for both student tuition and tax-dollar funding, its political fulcrum is increasingly mismatched with the society it purports to serve. To compound matters further, many prominent voices in higher education have responded to signs of its emerging ideological monoculture by either denying the empirical evidence or embracing the post-1998 shift as a positive good.

In this analysis, we briefly examine the history of faculty political composition and its implications for the learning environment of higher education. We conclude by echoing the concerns of James M. Buchanan (1999), who predicted that the politicization of university faculty would ultimately undermine public confidence in higher education, and with it, public budgetary support for our university system.

The History of Faculty Political Surveys

Although conservative public intellectuals have drawn attention to the leftward political biases of academia since at least the publication of God and Man at Tale (Buckley 1951), the academic literature and empirical evidence of the phenomenon, specifically directed toward higher ed faculty bias, did not emerge until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1971, political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Ladd first called attention to the ideological distribution of university faculty by placing it on an empirical looting. Working with the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education survey of more than one hundred thousand full-time professors at more than three hundred institutions, Lipset and Ladd identified a left-leaning plurality in university faculty ranks. Their analysis further documented a clear political divide within faculty ranks. Faculty in the liberal arts exhibited a stronger leftward disposition, and stronger political views in general, than faculty in the natural sciences. Although these patterns evinced some stability, they also warranted close attention and monitoring in the eyes of these authors. If the political distribution of the universities became skewed in one direction and mismatched with the public, public trust in universities would expectedly suffer.

Importantly, Lipset and Ladd's work established the first true empirical baseline for measuring faculty opinion over time. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, numerous academics responded to Lipset and Ladd by suggesting that concerns about a politically skewed faculty were overstated. In "The Myth of the Liberal Professor," for example, Michael A. Faia contended that "[a] majority of professors describe themselves as being to the right of liberalism--a tendency that seems to be increasing--and the professorial lifestyle does not appear to be particularly liberalizing" (1974, 171).

The literature in the 1970s and 1980s largely focused on how professors responded to the great political issues of the day. These included events such as the Vietnam War, campus protests, sit-ins, South African divestment, and race and gender issues. There is no clear ideological story to tell in a number of respects here, as these sorts of observations do not hold up particularly well over time. What were once radical positions are not necessarily so any longer, something that must be remembered with any conclusions that are offered.

The very nature of political inquiry is implicated here as well. Some argue that because academia focuses on expanding ideas, it is inherently opposed to conservatism, which seeks, in a nod to Buckley, to yell "Stop!" In some respects, a liberal-leaning academia should be expected to some degree. The confounding reality now, though, is that many liberal academics agree it is vital to limit ideas they deem harmful.

At the same time, however, these issues simultaneously shaped the general public's political distribution. The emergence of a gap between the public and the professoriate over time accordingly cannot be explained by the specific political issues...