Is a liberal academia biased against conservative faculty?

Last year David Horowitz spearheaded an advertisement campaign in college newspapers against reparations for slavery. The ad, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — and Racist Too," provoked protests and editorials on the pages of dozens of college newspapers, including the 'Prince.'

According to Horowitz's website magazine, Frontpagemagazine.com, most newspapers either refused to run the ad or issued an editorial apology at the same time that the ad ran. Horowitz said he considered the student reaction to the reparations ad a result of an increasing ideological imbalance in universities: for decades, it has been presumed that there are more liberal professors than their conservative counterparts.

Horowitz, a former campus radical during the Vietnam War years and now a vocal conservative commentator, last month released a poll of Ivy League professors, which he says confirms a longstanding assumption that college faculties are dominated overwhelmingly by the academic left. Horowitz alleges that this ideological imbalance between outspoken conservative and liberal academics will continue because of a current "hiring bias" against conservative values.

"I had an unhappy experience in the spring on college campuses which have become a one party political and intellectual state over the last twenty years," Horowitz said last week in an interview. "American universities haven't been this intellectually monochromatic and unfree possibly since the era of the Salem witch trials."

Horowitz claims that the poll, which was conducted by Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and architect of the 1994 Republican midterm election victory, supports his view of a political imbalance in academia. This imbalance is not limited to the Ivy League or to specific college campuses, but is a universal problem on American college campuses, he argued.

In a survey of 151 Ivy League professors, Luntz questioned academics on their political views on affirmative action, school vouchers and other political and social issues. He compared the responses to the findings of Gallup and other polls of the American population and concluded that professors in the Ivy League tend to be clustered on the liberal end of the political and cultural spectrum.

On the issue of slavery reparations, 40% of Ivy League professors said the federal government owes African-Americans some form of compensation, compared to just 11% of Americans. In the last presidential election, 61% of professors said they voted for Democrat candidate Al Gore and only six percent for President Bush. Five percent said they voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader '55 and 28% either did not vote or refused to answer. When asked: "All things considered, who do you think has been the best president in the past 40 years?" 26% of professors chose Bill Clinton while only four percent chose Ronald Reagan.

"This is the church of the political left," Horowitz said, referring to academia. "It doesn't allow room for students to breathe anything but a left-wing air."

But several Princeton students have said they had not confronted many situations on campus where the political views of a professor or preceptor hampered academic dialogue. David Tukey '02, former president of College Republicans said that he rarely finds professors dogmatic in their political views in the classroom.

"To the credit of Princeton that professors own viewpoints are overwhelming skewed to the left, they are pretty open," said Eric Wang '02, a conservative and fellow member of College Republicans. "They have been receptive to opposite viewpoints. While I'd like to see greater representation of professors who have conservative viewpoints of their own, I don't think my education has been particularly hindered."

Tukey related one story about an economics course where senior lecturer Elizabeth Bogan acknowledged she had presented a particularly conservative view on the World Trade Organization and then invited students in the audience to offer an alternative interpretation. A student responded, and presented a 10-15 minute liberal view of the organization, according to Tukey.

Robert George, a conservative University politics professor, said there is an ethos in academia created by a preponderance of liberal professors. College campuses tend to be representative of leftist views, he said, which is self-sustaining. "University policies reflect liberal ideological commitments," he said.

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George said he thinks the situation has gotten worse since the 1960s. Where earlier issues concerned economics and other primarily political questions, current society is grappling with culture wars — abortion, affirmative action, sexual orientation, just to name a few issues, he explained.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz takes the opposite view of the state of academia over time. "For a scholar of my age, it was a tremendous disadvantage to [be conservative]," he said. "I think it has turned around dramatically over the last 20 years."

He said he would have agreed with Horowitz 25 years ago, before liberalism became more diverse in scope. "It's not like there are 10,000 Teddy Kennedys beating up on conservatives," Katz said. On the contrary, the Reagan revolution spurred an acceptance of conservative views on college campuses, particularly in law and economics programs, he argued.

"Liberalism as a left ideology is dead," he added. "Conservatism is far from dead. That's the irony. Conservative thought is in much better situation."

During the last twenty years, outside organizations, such as the Olin foundation, have helped to fund university programs that investigate or support conservative ideas. The University's James Madison Program, for example. has received funds from Olin. Though George affirms that conservative values have a significant place in the Madison program, he feels university programs are not ideologically defined, and are too often only associated with specific faculty.

Horowitz said he believed there has been an increase in the political bias against conservatives in the current academic community. He supported a causation argument as part of the reason for liberal domination.

"Neither group should be excluded," he said. "But this can't happen by random effect. It is a political bias, a McCarthyism, worse than the 1950s — Joe McCarthy was outside the university community. Today's McCarthyites are sitting on the search committees."

George agreed that hiring bias is a reality. He says there is a dichotomous paradigm of conscious, or egregious, and sub-conscious bias against conservatives. He said he believed that bias of both types occurs at Princeton and other institutions, and said that liberal professors had reported to him specific cases where they said it had happened.

"I myself do believe that hiring bias is significant because I know of cases, where I believe that the hire wasn't made because of conservatism or perception of conservatism," he said.

Flagrant bias occurs, George explained, when a faculty member is considering an appointment candidate, and he finds that the candidate is conservative, reaches conservatives conclusions, or is part of a conservative organization, and therefore does not make the hire.

"I think it would be very surprising if didn't go on," George said. "[It] happens when one point of view is clearly dominant." He said he knew of some cases where egregious bias was the only explanation, most often in cases involving culturally or socially conservative views on abortion rather than libertarian or economically conservative views, such as tax cuts.

Jeffrey Stout, a religion professor, acknowledged a bias against cultural conservatives.

"I am far to Professor George's left on most issues, but I agree with him that liberal professors sometimes treat cultural conservatives, especially theological ones, unfairly," Stout said in an e-mail. "The most blatant cases I know of have involved unfairness to scholars who oppose abortion. On the other hand, I don't agree with Professor George's [view] that our culture is now best defined as a clash between secular liberalism and his kind of conservatism. There's a lot of unfairness and hypocrisy on both sides of that divide, and much to be gained by transcending the 'isms.'"

George agreed that the problem is not limited to the academic left. If the situation were switched, if the vast majority of faculty held conservative views and conservatives controlled the administration Horowitz's cries of the tyranny of the academic left would be leveled at the ideological right.

"I think that this is a problem of human nature not a problem of liberalism," he said. "It would be the same if the roles were reversed. [It is part of] a number of bad consequences of having an ideological imbalance — allows this bias to have a greater effect."

Sean Wilentz, a liberal University professor of history, disagreed with Horowitz's claim. "[Horowitz is] finding causation in what may only be a spurious correlation. This isn't social science, this is right-wing political agitation." He said that Horowitz's claim of systematic bias was just wrong and "certainly not true at Princeton." Katz echoed Wilentz, saying he did not believe there was institutional bias at schools like Princeton, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and University of California at Berkeley.

Wilentz said he believed that most academics are not politically impassioned, particularly those in the sciences. Having a faculty member for every political view is not essential and should not come at the cost of academic quality, Wilentz argued. "Even outside the classroom, not everybody is a red-diaper baby who is trying to, as far as I can see, overcome his own political guilt," he said of Horowitz.He said he felt that Princeton was relatively balanced in outspoken faculty, with he and George being the most public of the academic commentators at the University.

George said he thought the real problem on college campuses was the presence of a subconscious discrimination, or the tendency for faculty members to disregard the logical arguments present in academic work that reaches conclusions opposite to their own set of fundamental beliefs. Horowitz said that there was significant discrimination on invitations to commencement speakers and in academic publications.

George agreed that the American population does better represent the range of acceptable and rational views. He argued that the Election night 2000 map of a split country, split between the blue, democratic coasts and the red center of the country represented both conservative social and liberal views better than college faculties.