Media Inquiries: Véronique Rodman
vrodman@aei.org 202.862.4870

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 14, 2007

New research released today by the American Enterprise Institute documents the prevalent perception that university faculties are tilted substantially toward the left. The studies, part of a forthcoming book entitled Reforming the Politically Correct University (AEI Press, 2008), also show that socially conservative professors must publish more than their liberal peers to get the same jobs and that conservative students are dissuaded from pursuing Ph.D.s due to fewer research offers with their professors.

In their survey of quantitative evidence on the ideological profile of university faculty, professors Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University find that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and progressives by roughly two-to-one in economics, more than five-to-one in fields such as political science, and by more than twenty-to-one in disciplines like sociology and anthropology. Klein and Stern base their findings on survey research--accumulated since the 1960s--of the ideology, policy views, and voting behavior of faculty, as well as on all reliable voter-registration studies of university professors.

In a companion essay, Klein and Stern found that this bias is likely explained by a psychological phenomenon known as "groupthink." According to groupthink theory, organizations tend to choose and reward only those people who are similar to the organization's dominant members. This becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism resulting in increased homogeneity and self-validation. Since the predominant academic orientation is liberal or progressive, university faculties have become less, not more, ideologically diverse over time.

For example, groupthink occurs in universities when students--who might threaten the academy's ideological predispositions--are subtly discouraged from pursuing doctorates. Using a national survey of college and university seniors, Matthew Woessner of Penn State Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College find that conservative students are substantially less likely to want to pursue doctorates than similarly situated liberal and progressive peers. While this disparity is partly due to unexplained differences in career motivations, evidence also suggests that conservative students lack academic role models and have more distant relationships with faculty.

Even determined conservatives who complete graduate school face unseen barriers blocking their professional academic aspirations. Smith College's Stanley Rothman and George Mason University's S. Robert Lichter find strong statistical evidence that socially conservative academics must publish substantially more books and articles to get the same jobs as liberal peers. Using a 1999 survey of 1,643 professors drawn from 183 randomly selected colleges and universities, the authors find that while scholarly productivity has the greatest impact on career advancement in academia, ideology had about one-third as much impact as merit in determining the career success of socially conservative university professors.

Other essays presented at the November 14, 2007, conference examine ideological diversity within specific disciplines. These include:

• University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor examines literature departments and finds that the 1950s had more intellectual diversity, when schools of literary study like Yale's New Criticism and Princeton's Robertsonianism competed with one another in the broader academic universe. Today, a stultifying uniformity reigns, as literature departments study a wider variety of works only through the lenses of race, class, and gender oppression.
• Manhattan Institute scholar and former UC Berkeley professor John McWhorter demonstrates how the field of linguistics has departed from its original mission--a nonpartisan investigation of how languages and dialects differ among groups--to become dominated by a leftist-driven advocacy for the downtrodden, as the controversy over Ebonics, or "Black English," shows.
• University of Virginia scholar James Ceaser and Villanova professor Robert Maranto examine the discipline of political science and find it only slightly less rigidly liberal than other areas. The cause: certain subfields such as constitutional law, traditional political philosophy, political economy, and international relations require skills that permit moderates and conservatives to compete effectively for jobs. Nevertheless, because over 80 percent of all political scientists are liberal or progressive, the political science discourse in universities is quite restricted.

"This leftward bias harms the university and its students," said project codirector Robert Maranto. "It limits the questions we academics ask and the phenomenon we study, thus limiting the ideas which undergraduates are exposed to during their college education."

While some conservative critics of the current university scene argue that the situation cries out for government regulation, Maranto answers that such a cure would be worse than the disease. "Universities must reform themselves if they are to retain the intellectual vibrancy and independence that characterizes higher education at its best," he said. "While pressure from parents, alumni, and trustees can help, only professors themselves, by rededicating themselves to a culture of free academic inquiry, can restore the American academy to the pinnacle it once inhabited."

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