Blogs > Cliopatria > Tierney and Zywicki

Oct 12, 2005

Tierney and Zywicki


by Cliopatria


Behind the firewall in this morning's Times, John Tierney discusses the irony of journalists and legal scholars"decrying 'cronyism' and calling for 'mainstream' values when picking a Supreme Court justice," when they seem oblivious to such concerns in"picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers." Recent studies suggest that the faculty of j-schools and law schools are almost as one-sided as that of the nation's undergraduate colleges and universities.

As Tierney points out, institutions of higher education"keep meticulous tabs on the race and gender and ethnic background of their students and faculty, but the lack of political diversity is taken as a matter of course. As long as the professors look different, why worry if they think the same?"

Volokh Conspiracy contributor and Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki expands on this theme in an important article published in the most recent issue of American Spectator. I've been unable to find the article on-line, but it builds off arguments Zywicki initially made in this lengthy Volokh post.

Zywicki offers the most persuasive case I have seen that"self-selection is a deeply flawed explanation for the prevailing ideological imbalance on college campuses." He does so by taking apart the most serious critique of the Stanley Rothman study of ideological one-sidedness in the academy, especially at more elite institutions.

The critique's authors cite three elements to sustain their thesis of self-selection: the rural/urban divide (they claim that" conservative" scholars are less likely to want to teach at elite institutions, since such schools are generally in urban areas); regional selection (the Midwest and the South, with fewer elite schools, tend to be more conservative); and the fantastic assertion that"many conservatives may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method."

As Zywicki notes, his own institution, Dartmouth, is as rural a college as one could find--yet the party and ideological ratio among its faculty is comparable to that at elite schools located in urban areas. If the regional explanation were compelling, he wonders, how could one account for the findings in the survey that started the recent high-profile controversy, that of the Duke Conservative Union, which showed that Duke's humanities departments had a partisan breakdown of 142 registered Dems to 8 registered Repubs, with the ratio in History 32-0. As for the third element of the critique--which Zywicki correctly notes is so weak that it demonstrates the"straw-gasping" of Rothman's critics--if it were true, shouldn't the ideological disparity between leftists and conservatives be highest in the fields for which the"scientific method" is fundamental, the natural sciences? Yet the reverse is true:"the ideological divide is much narrower in the fields in which the scientific method is used . . . and widest where it is most absent."

Zywicki concludes by noting that the academy would be well served devoting a portion of the money currently spent on"diversity" initiatives and instead" conduct a study of the causes of the ideological disparity in the academy, rather than simply speculate and pontificate. At the very least, such a study would eliminate some of the more preposterous hypotheses--such as self-selection--for the under-representation of conservatives in academia."

I'm not holding my breath, however, that the issue will be high on the agenda of any major group representing the higher education establishment.


comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

John H. Lederer - 10/14/2005

Does that explain a profound switch in political leaning in the last 50 years?

Does it explain the reports--granted apocryphal-- by conservative graduate students of hiding their conservatism in order to get a fair shake at employment?

Robert KC Johnson - 10/13/2005

I'd agree that the statement that "sharp conservatives will be more likely than sharp liberals to want to make money. These will go into business rather than academics" is far from obvious. According to the CNN exit poll for the 2004 election, voters who earned $100,000 or more favored Bush 58-41. So it seems that there are lots of liberals who have wanted to make money, too.

The strongest argument against self-selection is that it doesn't explain the trend. If conservatives are more likely than liberals (and, again, it's worth keeping in mind that the definition of these two terms when it comes to the academy is very different than in the political realm, since many political "liberals" would be considered academic "conservatives") to eschew the academy for the military, ministry, or business, the academy should have always tilted far to the left. Yet the surveys I've seen suggest that the percentage of self-described liberals or Leftists in the academy has roughly doubled in the last 25 years. Self-selection can't very well explain both the early 1980s figures and those of 2005.

Christopher Newman - 10/12/2005

"Sharp conservatives will be more likely than sharp liberals to want to make money. These will go into business rather than academics."

-- I don't think this is obvious or self-evident. It seems to me that many sharp conservatives would prefer academia to business, for the same reasons that liberals might prefer it -- and for some different, more stereotypically "conservative" reasons as well. I do think that, at this point, there are strong disincentives for conservatives who might otherwise be attracted to academia. Who wants to spend the long years of graduate school and pre-tenure professorships either constantly suppressing one's viewpoint or constantly fighting battles that arise from the open expression of it?

Jason Kuznicki - 10/12/2005

I have often thought that the sources of the left-leaning bias in academics were obvious, yet none of them were addressed here.

--Conservatives who are driven toward intellectual, pedagogical, or public-service pursuits may tend to opt for the ministry instead.

--Sharp conservatives will be more likely than sharp liberals to want to make money. These will go into business rather than academics.

--Conservatives of all stripes are more likely than liberals to go into the military.

Self-selection because of disgust with the academy is insufficient as a reason. But self-selection in favor of other pursuits seems perfectly plausible.