This month, we feature an interview with two academics who have produced a study on political bias that does pass academe’s standards for valid research. It is entitled “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors” and was published in the Fall 2006 issue of the peer-reviewed Public Opinion Quarterly, the scholarly journal of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. University of Akron professor John F. Zipp, chair of the department of sociology, and associate professor of sociology Rudy Fenwick, chair of the university faculty senate, based their analysis on data drawn from the 1989 and 1997 National Surveys of Faculty, conducted under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Both surveys employed a two-stage, stratified random sampling design.

AFT associate director of higher education Craig Smith asked the professors about the study for Free Exchange on Campus. This is a coalition of education and civil liberties groups—of which AFT is a founding member—that is combating attempts to limit students’ freedom to learn, such as David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights.”

CRAIG SMITH: Can you tell us what you set out to examine with your research and why you decided to take on this project?

JOHN ZIPP AND RUDY FENWICK: There were a series of events in late 2004 and early 2005 that led us to pursue this research. It started with George Will’s op-ed piece in November 2004, “Academia, Stuck to the Left,” claiming that faculty were this liberal monolith threatening traditional academic freedom in American higher education by imposing their view on colleagues and students. A few days after Will’s piece appeared, our university president mentioned it at an arts and science faculty meeting as one of many attacks on higher education. After that meeting, we were talking about Will’s piece and how, in our many years in higher ed, we had not experienced anything close to a liberal monolith—and we’re in sociology, supposedly one of the most liberal outposts of academe!

We remembered that in the 1990s two sociologists (Richard Hamilton and Lowell Hargens) had published an article that used Carnegie Institute surveys on faculty attitudes/values and found that, between the late 1960s and the 1980s, faculty had actually become less, not more, liberal. Because their article was published in 1993, the last Carnegie survey they examined was 1984. We also knew that there were more recent Carnegie surveys—in 1989, 1993 and 1997. So, we realized that we could use these more recent surveys to address the claims of conservative commentators.

And you had your own close encounter with the ideas of David Horowitz in Ohio, am I right?

Yes, a version of his Academic Bill of Rights was introduced in the state Legislature in early 2005. That added urgency to this project. When we looked at the preliminary results of the Carnegie data, which supported our suspicions that faculty were not overwhelmingly liberal, we knew we had to get these results out, not just to get a publication, but to inform public—and hopefully legislative—opinion on this issue.

We published the preliminary results in an op-ed piece in the Dayton Daily News (“College Incorporated,” Feb. 14, 2005) and made them available through the Ohio Faculty Council (an organization of faculty senate representatives from all Ohio public universities) and selected legislators. We would like to think that we had some small effect on the outcome, since the legislation was withdrawn in favor of an agreement between the Legislature and state universities to “monitor” the situation through existing university policies. Although this allowed Horowitz to claim victory, it did not impose direct state oversight, nor force changes to existing policies.

What were the basic findings of your research?

We have several key findings:

(1) Although liberal faculty outnumber conservatives (between 2.3-to-1 and 2.6-to-1 in the most recent data), from 1989 and 1997 faculty showed increased movement to the center.

(2) There are considerable differences in the relative liberalism of faculty across disciplines and institutional types, with conservatives being the plurality in some fields (e.g., business, vocational fields) and in two-year colleges.

(3) Younger cohorts of faculty tend to be more centrist and conservative than older cohorts, while women tend to be more liberal than men—trends that could have countervailing impacts over time.

(4) There are significant differences in educational values between liberal and conservative faculty, with conservatives being more interested in preparing students for careers and in shaping their values, and less interested in teaching creative thinking.

So you found that more faculty are liberal, but with some important qualifications. What were they?

There are four important qualifications to the portrait of faculty as “liberal”:

(1) As we mentioned previously, the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty is between 2-to-1 and 3-to-1, and has remained within that range since the 1980s. These are hardly the monolithic 7-1 or 10-1 ratios given by conservative commentators.

(2) The percentages of liberals and conservatives vary considerably by discipline, with humanities and social sciences being the most liberal, but with popular majors, such as computer science, engineering and business, having more conservatives.

(3) Likewise, types of higher education institutions vary: Selective liberal arts colleges tend to be most liberal, while two-year schools tend to have more conservative than liberal faculty. By the way, there are a lot more students and faculty in two-year colleges than selective liberal arts colleges; about 40 percent of all students attend two-year schools, so you could look at this as conservatives having a greater presence where the most students are.

(4) As we alluded to before, political orientations vary by demographic in ways that produce somewhat offsetting trends: Younger faculty are less liberal than older faculty, while female faculty—an increasing percentage of faculty—are more liberal than male faculty.

These conclusions don’t jibe with previous studies claiming very significant differences between the number of liberal and conservative faculty. Have those studies overstated the case?

We believe so; that’s what started us on this project. If you really look at the studies on faculty politics most often cited by conservatives, they use very selective data that support their claims. One study looked only at faculty in selective liberal arts colleges—the most liberal type of institution; while another looked only at faculty in the humanities and social sciences—again, the most liberal disciplines. None of these studies used by conservatives has examined across-the-board, representative data from all academic disciplines and all types of academic institutions. One may wonder if they have deliberately “cherry picked” the data to get the results they want. And, there is a second way we believe conservatives have overstated and misrepresented their case. While they claim that faculty have a monolithic liberal/leftist political orientation, all these studies look at is party identification and voting behavior. What they actually find in their selective studies is that faculty who register and/or vote Democratic outnumber Republicans by 7-to-1 or 10-to-1. Well, this is not the same thing as political orientation. What we found, and report in our article, is that while Republicans are becoming increasingly a conservative monolith, Democratic orientations are very diverse. There are about two liberals for every conservative among Democrats, but the large plurality and close to a majority of Democrats identify their politics as “centrist” or “middle-of-the-road.” So, even if the conservative studies were right in their numbers, they actually say nothing about the political orientations of American faculty.

The second part of your study looks at whether faculty are pushing an ideological agenda on their students. You indicate that there is “little evidence” this is the case. Can you go into a bit more detail here on what you did find?

The claim advanced by conservative critics of higher education is that liberal faculty are pushing their own ideological agenda on their students, a claim that has been made using anecdotal evidence. In contrast, we used national survey data to analyze the importance faculty ascribed to various goals of undergraduate education—preparing students for a career, shaping students’ values, enhancing creative thinking, and providing an appreciation of literature and the arts—and to intellectual freedom and disciplinary standards of scholarship.

What we found is quite interesting, and in some ways, supports the contention of conservative critics: Conservative faculty members have very different educational values from their moderate and liberal colleagues. The nature of these differences, however, is quite ironic: Conservative faculty are more interested in preparing students for careers and in shaping their values, less interested in teaching creative thinking or an appreciation of literature and the arts, and less supportive of tenure and the free exchange of ideas in the classroom. Thus, in some respects, it may be conservative faculty who are somewhat guilty of the charges that conservative critics have leveled at liberal academics.

We would like to hear a bit more about your methodology—not in technical terms, but rather in the sense of why a state legislator, a regent or a trustee, hearing testimony on this issue, should consider your findings more reliable than the findings of other studies.

The most important reason why our findings are more reliable than some of the more recent studies is that we are using national data that covers all types of colleges and universities and all disciplines. As we point out in the article, some of the recent studies focused on selected disciplines or types of institutions, choosing ones that are among the most liberal.

Second, we didn’t just look at the liberalism of the faculty in general, but examined if there were any differences between men and women, by age cohort, by discipline and by institutional type. This allows us to understand the considerable ideological diversity that exists in American higher education.

Finally, we used a statistical technique (regression analysis) to see if liberal and conservative faculty differed on educational goals and support for academic freedom. This analytical method allows us to determine if political ideology shapes these goals and values, even after taking into account other differences that exist among faculty (e.g., age, gender, discipline, institutional type).

Do critics like David Horowitz speak for a large number of increasingly alienated students and faculty who feel intimidated by liberal faculty?

There is no evidence of this—no increasing complaints by students of faculty political bias, no increasing complaints by faculty that their conservative or centrist political opinions have cost them tenure or promotion. The only evidence Horowitz and others have offered are anecdotal incidents, and most of these have been disproved. This is the subject of a chapter that we are just completing for a forthcoming book, The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: A Handbook, (Praeger, 2007).

To keep this in perspective, you have to ask: What, and who, is behind the attacks on faculty politics? As Deep Throat told Woodward in All the President’s Men, “follow the money.” If one does this with Horowitz and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center), one comes to an enlightening—and more than slightly disturbing—destination. Between 2001 and 2003, CSPC received more than $3 million in funding from three conservative foundations: Bradley, Scaife and Olin. Since its creation in 1989, CSPC has received more than $13 million from these and other conservative groups. These foundations, along with the Coors and Smith Richardson foundations, also fund the conservative National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (the latter includes among its founders Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president). The Bradley Foundation also was the major source of funding for Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. Overall, it is estimated that conservative groups spend about $38 million per year to promote their political agenda on American college campuses. In an article earlier this year in The Nation, Max Blumenthal makes a compelling case that all of this money is part of a long-term (going back to the 1960s), well-coordinated effort by conservatives to gain dominance over American colleges and universities.

Is there anything else you would like to add about the project or about the climate within higher education that makes this article so timely?

The considerable discussion over how liberal faculty undermine academic freedom has deflected public attention and the gaze of policymakers from what may indeed be a much more insidious threat to academic freedom: the growing commercialization or corporatization of universities. Simply put, universities are increasingly acting in ways similar to profit-making corporations, turning higher education away from a public good into a private good. There are several key indicators of this trend:

(1) the expansion of for-profit universities (e.g., the University of Phoenix);

(2) the increased emphasis in research universities on technology transfer, especially in terms of the acquisition and marketing of patents and the licensing of university products; and

(3) the increased reliance in universities on a contingent labor force.

That sounds like the subject for another interview. Thanks to professors Zipp and Fenwick for their work and their time.