Political views of American academics
Demographic surveys of faculty that began in the 1950s and continue to the present have found higher percentages of liberals than of conservatives, particularly among those who work in the humanities and social sciences.
Citing the tactics of private hearings, requiring respondents to name others, and denying rights of legal representation, Smith calls the investigations a "dress rehearsal for McCarthyism".
[1] That same year, the New York State Legislature created the Rapp-Coutert Committee, which held hearings in 1940–41 during which faculty accused of holding communist political beliefs were interrogated.
"[5]: 35 In 1950, the University of California Board of Regents and its administration began to require faculty to sign a two-part political loyalty oath: one part required faculty to declare they were not Communists, and did not believe in the tenets of Communism;[6] the other part was an oath of loyalty to the state of California and the US Constitution in accordance with the Levering Act.
[9]: 122 In 1970, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover sent an open letter to US college students, advising them to reject leftist politics,[10] and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI conducted a secret counterintelligence program in libraries.
[5] According to sociologist Neil Gross, the study was significant because it was the first effort to poll university faculty specifically about their political views.
[5] 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 sample, extensive questions about political views, and what Neil Gross characterized as highly rigorous analytic methods.
They also reported that faculty in the humanities and social sciences tended to be the most liberal, while those in "applied professional schools such as nursing and home economics" and in agriculture were the most conservative.
[12][13][11]: 28–30 Smaller follow-up surveys on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation held in 1975, 1984, 1989, and 1997 showed an increased trend among professors toward the left, apart from a small movement to the right in 1984.
[29] Stanley Rothman, the project lead after the passing of Ladd and Lipset, published a paper using NAASS data along with Neil Nevitte and S. Robert Lichter which concluded "complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study".
[30][29][31] Neil Gross and Solon Simmons conducted a survey starting in 2006 called the Politics of the American Professoriate which led to several study papers and books.
They designed their survey to improve on past studies which they felt had not included community college professors, addressed low response rates, or used standardized questions.
[32][21]: 25–26 Inside Higher Ed reported that economist Lawrence H. Summers made his own analysis of the data collected by Gross and Simmons and found a larger gap among faculty teaching "core disciplines for undergraduate education" at selective research universities, but the report also concluded that "there was widespread praise for the way the survey was conducted, with Summers and others predicting that their data may become the definitive source for understanding professors' political views.
In a 2016 opinion column in The New York Times, for example, political scientist Samuel J. Abrams used HERI data to argue that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty varied greatly between regions.
[39] Russell Jacoby questioned the focus of the study on the social sciences rather than STEM fields saying that the "reason is obvious: Liberals do not outnumber conservatives in many of those disciplines".
[41][42][43][44] William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom", Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals have made such arguments.
[31][48]: 38–55 Lawrence Summers said at a symposium about The Social and Political Views of American Professors that he considers it a problem that some academics express an "extreme hostility" to conservative opinions.
He observed that faculty who were invited to give Tanner Lectures on Human Values were almost always liberals, and expressed concern that an imbalance in political representation at universities could impede rigorous examination of issues.
[19] One outcome of these controversies was the founding of the Heterodox Academy in 2015, a bipartisan organization of professors seeking to increase the acceptance of diverse political viewpoints in academic discourse.
[18] 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 preserve their political identity.
[20] 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.
