In Short:

Models — often falling under the category of “structural” or “systemic” injustice — turn out to be surprisingly useful in explaining why so few conservatives are present among elite university faculties.

Abstract

More conspicuously than at any time in living memory, elite higher education has found itself in the political crosshairs. Who could have predicted a year ago that the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard would, in quick succession, be thrown out of a job after less than two years in office between them? Or that presidents of other elite universities would be holding on by the skin of their teeth?

While these and other university leaders’ responses to the Hamas attack on Israel lit the fire, the dry tinder for a political assault on our most prestigious universities has been sitting around for some time. What started in Philadelphia and Cambridge will not stop there.

Those who sense more than a whiff of political opportunism and anti-intellectualism in this assault are not mistaken. But the public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed minded is undeniably correct. Indeed, concerns about the ideological drift of the university are no longer limited to conservatives, but now include some left-leaning faculty who worry that higher education has become, in the words of Princeton professor Gregory Conti, “sectarian.”

This mounting sectarianism manifests itself in various aspects of the university, including the scope of debate within and outside the classroom, the growth of campus administration, and the tenor of student life. For a professor like myself, the character of the professoriate is the most salient aspect. And where conservative faculty are concerned, the facts are beyond dispute: Their numbers are low and continue to fall.

Claremont McKenna’s Jon Shields summarized the basic trend in the Fall 2018 issue of this journal, finding that outside of economics, the percentages of conservatives in the social-science and humanities disciplines have dropped to the single digits. In my own field of political science, Harvard professor Pippa Norris has found that the cohort born in 1990 (the newly minted full professors of today) is considerably further to the left than those born in 1960 (those approaching retirement). This means that a further drift leftward among the professoriate is already baked in as a result of generational replacement. At my own university, I would be hard-pressed to name a single tenured professor in the social sciences and humanities who is openly right of center in any reasonable understanding of the term.

The university’s ideological narrowing has advanced so far that even liberal institutionalists — faculty who believe universities should be places of intellectual pluralism and adhere to the traditional academic norms of merit and free inquiry — are in decline. While we do not have good data on the rising cohort of graduate students, I have talked to faculty at several institutions who report that with each passing year, every class of admitted graduate students is further to the left of, and displays a more activist orientation toward scholarship than, the class preceding it. And of course, the graduate students of today are the junior faculty of tomorrow.

How could this have come to be? And what can be done about it?

Social scientists have developed a rich set of theories to explain the origins of group-based differences. These theories are largely designed to explain patterns of durable gender, racial, and ethnic inequality, and tend to emphasize factors beyond individual discrimination. Such models — often falling under the category of “structural” or “systemic” injustice — turn out to be surprisingly useful in explaining why so few conservatives are present among elite university faculties. They also lead to some unexpected directions for reform.

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