The Trump administration‘s efforts to reform higher education have been hampered by a lack of accurate data. As a recent Heterodox Academy report noted, current studies of faculty political diversity have serious weaknesses.
This leaves voters, policymakers, and even schools with a limited look at the problems they face. But there is a better way to measure faculty political skew that provides a clear look at the extent of the problem and how to address it: professors’ research interests.
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The most common techniques to measure ideological diversity on campus look at academics’ party registrations or surveys of faculty. Both have real flaws. Party registration is a blunt tool. There is a big difference between a registered Democrat who is apolitical in the classroom and one who is an outspoken progressive scholar-activist.
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Most surveys have small samples and low response rates, which leads to unintentional skew. A progressive who objects to the premise of “viewpoint diversity” might be less likely to respond to a survey from an organization he regards as suspect. Crucially, many studies also tend to focus narrowly on the Ivy League, providing little insight into academia’s broader bend.
By contrast, an examination of professors’ research interests gives a clear, detailed look at their views insofar as they affect scholars’ academic work. For a study I conducted through Claremont McKenna College last year, I combed academic biographies from English and history faculty employed by 257 colleges across America for uses of “woke” or identity-based keywords in their biographies — words like “queer,” “postcolonial,” “Latinx,” “racist,” or “social justice.” Unlike inquiries into “race” or “gender,” which could be of interest to either liberal or conservative professors, the terms I searched for implied a particular left-wing ideology.
The results showed that President Donald Trump has been too narrowly focused on the Ivy League. At the average school, 43% of English and history professors had progressive keywords in their academic biographies. While Ivy League colleges were worse than average at 51%, the non-Ivy percentage was still substantial at 42%. That the problem extends so far across the country shows it cannot be solved by presidential fiat.
This broad-based ideological skew limits the range of ideas American students learn in the classroom. Claremont McKenna professor Jon Shields’s research found that professors who teach left-leaning texts teach the corresponding right-leaning responses less than 5% of the time. Professor bias can also drive student self-censorship. Comparing data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, I found that at colleges where under 20% of professors had left-wing keywords, 45% of students were uncomfortable speaking about controversial political topics in class. At colleges where over 60% of professors had these keywords, the discomfort rate rose to 54%.
Given the sheer extent of this problem, any attempt to combat progressive campus dominance requires concerted pressure from both inside and outside the university. Inside schools, hiring should focus on a diverse range of research interests, especially in the humanities. Donors who care about ideological diversity should fund professorships and programs in areas that liberals often ignore. More organizations like Johns Hopkins’s Grad Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative should support the efforts of conservatives who aim to enter academia.
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Outside of schools, Congress should put ideological diversity conditions on universities’ receipt of federal funds. If universities don’t like these conditions, they are free to forgo the funds.
It’s easy to dismiss individual conservatives’ complaints about academia. But seeing the scope of ideological bias in raw data should end any debate over whether this is a real issue.
Henry Long is a media relations assistant at a Washington think tank.
