The "Public Good" Explanation
This disparity has three possible explanations:
• Departments are ideologically screening new faculty.
• Departments are framing new lines in such a way to make it far less likely that the hire will be conservative.
• The disparity is irrelevant, unavoidable, or a coincidence.
The first possibility—that departments are engaging in overt ideological screening in hiring new faculty—seems to me the least likely explanation. This is an issue I try to follow closely, and am aware of only two specific publicized cases, and one broader field case, though I would be happy to hear of more from any Cliopatria readers.
The first: at Smith College, Economics professor James Miller was denied tenure after some members of his department admitted finding his articles in the National Review “disturbing.” (The denial was later overturned and the college’s grievance committee conceded that Miller’s academic freedom had been violated.)
The second: at Brooklyn College, President C.M. Kimmich named a women’s studies professor to the History personnel committee even after learning that she had quizzed a job applicant about the inappropriateness of his having published articles for a conservative, Christian webzine and had strenuously opposed an honorary degree for Eugene Genovese on the grounds of Genovese’s allegedly “conservative” beliefs.
More generally, the field of “global studies” allows colleges to screen applicants ideologically by asking whether they would agree with a field whose “scholarship” consists of papers making such assertions as the need for “regime change” in the United States and the need for “militant action” to restore open admission to CUNY’s senior colleges.
Such open bias, however, is rare. The changing nature of history departments, about which I’ve written previously, is a far more likely explanation of the figures in the Klein study. Certain fields in History (and in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences) tend to be dominated by figures on one side of the ideological spectrum (African-American, labor, cultural, and gender history on one side; military and business history on the other). That a department like Michigan’s decides to frame job descriptions in such a way to hire its ninth, tenth, or eleventh specialist in race in America even while it has no professors who specialize in diplomatic or military history makes the 96.8% from California’s elite schools easier to understand.
This ideological imbalance also has a reinforcing effect in searches. Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley, notes in the Times article that the predominant “view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe. Debate is stifled, and conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor judgment.” As reporter John Tierney perceptively observes in the article, the structure of academia “allows hiring decisions and research agendas to be determined by small, independent groups of scholars. These fiefs, the critics say, suffer from a problem described in The Federalist Papers: an autonomous ‘small republic’ is prone to be dominated by a cohesive faction that uses majority voting to ‘outnumber and oppress the rest,’ in Madison's words.”
The third explanation for the Klein study (and other such surveys) is that the disparity is irrelevant, unavoidable, or a coincidence. Party registration is a crude mechanism for detecting academic bias: there is no reason why a registered Democrat should teach most courses any differently from a registered Republican. Yet one would think that responsible administrators would be concerned enough about the overwhelmingly one-sided figures cited in the Klein study—96.8% of new hires belonging to one political party—that, at the very least, they would inquire as to whether such numbers suggested that merit was not always the predominant concern in hiring decisions.
Not so at Berkeley, where Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau dismissed the Klein survey as irrelevant: “The essence of a great university is developing and sharing new knowledge as well as questioning old dogma. We do this in an environment which prizes academic freedom and freedom of expression. These principles are respected by all of our faculty at U.C. Berkeley, no matter what their personal politics are."
Attempts to explain away the figures, meanwhile, only undermined the case. For instance, Cal professor George P. Lakoff told Tierney that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views:"Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about."
Let’s imagine some permutations of that statement."Unlike men, women believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about." Or, “Unlike Jews, Italians believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about." Such insulting generalizations would be dismissed as—most charitably—intellectually sloppy and—most accurately—rationalizations for behavior that can’t stand the light of public scrutiny.
Indeed, the public defenses of the status quo—such as Lakoff’s remark, or Duke philosophy chairman Robert Brandon’s dismissal of a similar ideological imbalance among Duke’s faculty (“If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire”)—most clearly suggest that the problem of ideological bias in the personnel process is a real one, and is unlikely to improve any time soon.
*--corrected from original post, which didn't make the point about those who didn't declare party registrations.