BY CHARLIE TYSON AND NAOMI ORESKES

A couple of years ago, we decided to look at the question of liberal bias in the American academy. Are American colleges and universities disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives? For most conservatives, and even some liberals, the answer is obvious. We wanted to examine whether the claim was true, and if not, how so many people came to believe it.

The impression that higher education is crippled by political bias has damaged public support for intellectual life in this country. The accusation of liberal bias has weakened trust in the academy, in academic experts, and in scientific claims that emerge from the academy. In recent years, many states—especially those led by Republican governments—have continued to slash appropriations to public colleges and universities, and a slim majority of Republicans now say that they think colleges and universities are bad for the country.

What’s more: The university is an institution uniquely dedicated to contemplation, question-asking, and the search for truth. Material conditions and institutional choices, including widespread disinvestment in the humanities, already threaten these aspirations. As the AAUP has documented, roughly three-quarters of American faculty are adjuncts. But some commentators have argued that political bias, too, is distorting the pursuit of knowledge in the academic system. So we figured we should see whether the charge of liberal bias had much in the way of foundation.

Our review of the empirical and historical evidence found that the complaint about academic liberal bias is poorly supported.

We started by trying to figure out how liberal the ranks of faculty actually are. The answer is: pretty liberal, but not so much as you’d think. We found an uneven and highly partisan research literature, much of it produced by conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. Many studies of faculty politics are scattershot looks at voter-registration records (a methodologically problematic approach), selectively focus on elite four-year, private institutions while ignoring the much larger realm of public universities and community colleges, and suffer from other sampling issues. The most comprehensive and methodologically robust research on the topic is a 2006 study by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. Gross and Simmons designed a study that included a wide range of institutions and academic disciplines and asked standardly worded questions about policy matters. They found a much more centrist professoriate than conservative critics claim. In fact, they found a slight plurality of moderates. While academia is one of the most liberal professions in America, it remains roughly representative of the pool from which it draws its ranks: highly educated people.

Conservatives have been complaining about academic liberal bias for a very long time. Higher education, especially elite higher education, has been puzzlingly central in conservative rhetoric from William F. Buckley forward. We trace current debates about liberal bias back to an organized right-wing campaign, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, to discredit mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, chief among them the press and universities. Colleges and universities are a major front in a long-running cultural war about who gets to decide what is true.

We published our findings in the Social Epistemology Review & Reply Collective and, in condensed form, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle essay elicited a reply from Phillip W. Magness, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, the libertarian group behind the recent Great Barrington Declaration, which criticizes mainstream public health advice on COVID-19. Magness cited survey data from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which (he argued) shows that American faculty underwent a “rapid leftward shift” starting in the late 1990s. According to the HERI survey, the proportion of American faculty members self-identifying as “liberal” or “far-left” rose from 44.8 percent in 1998 to 59.8 percent in 2016–17.

Magness presented an imperfect data source as an open-and-shut case, and flattened out the complexities involved in how faculty identify politically. In our essay we acknowledged that as far as we could tell, roughly 60 percent of the professoriate were somewhere to the left of center—an appraisal consistent with the HERI data Magness cited. But the HERI survey, though a valuable instrument for certain purposes, is a general questionnaire, not a targeted study of faculty politics. The survey asks fifty-five questions, of which only one is about politics: “How would you characterize your political views?” Respondents classify themselves using a five-point scale: far left, liberal, middle of the road, conservative, and far right. (Unlike the Gross and Simmons study, the HERI survey asks no policy questions that would allow us to match political labels to concrete political stances.) That is a crude instrument for measuring as complex an issue as political position.

Moreover, cross-referencing the HERI findings with the more fine-grained data from Gross and Simmons suggests that a good deal of the faculty cohort Gross and Simmons classify as “slightly liberal”—and as part of the moderate bloc, based on their answers to standardly worded policy questions—are subsumed in the HERI data into the “liberal” bloc. In other words: a study that offers faculty more options for self-labeling, and that asks standardly worded questions about what faculty actually believe politically, reveals a more centrist professoriate.

Finally, if the academy’s center-leftists increasingly began to identify as “liberal” rather than “moderate” around the year 2000, they were not alone in doing so. Survey data from Gallup shows that in 2000, some 28 percent of Democrats identified as liberal, versus more than 40 percent who identified as moderate. By 2018, the self-identified liberals had increased to 51 percent. Interpretation of the HERI data needs to factor in this broader trend of political relabeling among left-of-center Americans. Moreover, self-reported labels only tell us so much; identifications such as “moderate” or “liberal” are not timeless and static. The meanings people attach to these labels are constantly shifting in relation to political evolutions in the society at large. If a country is yanked rightward by its conservative wing, then yesterday’s moderates might be today’s liberals.

In our reply to Magness, we raised these points, while also addressing the difficult question of why highly educated people tend to be more liberal.

We encourage AAUP members to read our initial articles, Magness’s response, and our reply to Magness.

Our guest bloggers are Charlie Tyson, a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University, and Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University.