PrintAFT report exposes pseudo-scientific bunk masquerading as 'research'
How much truth is behind these claims? Not much, but that hardly seems to matter to ideologues with an axe to grind.
The AFT asked Washington, D.C.-based education researcher John Lee to do a scientific analysis of the eight “studies” touted by faculty and academic freedom-bashers as evidence of how low higher education has sunk (see Summary of Studies). He found no merit to the claims of these studies’ authors: no hypotheses proved, no way to accurately replicate the findings or honestly apply them to the hundreds of thousands of professional educators who make up the U.S. professoriate.
The pseudo-scientific researchers show a pattern. They use one unscientific study after another, laden with emotional, even polemical language, to build a case that rests on ideology, not facts. And then they continue to cite that case in conservative organization-sponsored symposia, for Inside Higher Ed commentaries and mainstream press editorials, and at legislative hearings like the ones that took place this year in Pennsylvania.
Does voting make you unfit to teach?
The goal appears to be to wrestle control of the classroom from professionals by making the case that they are not professional. Can a registered Democrat be considered a professional? According to one study, the act of practicing one’s civic duty—registering to vote and voting in elections—is evidence of liberal bias in the classroom. Even if one accepted that odd premise, the study by conservative David Horowitz and its broad application of conclusions is deeply flawed, as Lee shows.
“Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities,” by David Horowitz and E. Lehrer, is a 2003 review of the party registrations of tenured or tenure-track faculty in the departments of Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology at Ivy League institutions. Horowitz and Lehrer suggest this is a representative sample of all faculty even though they were only able to match about 33 percent of faculty with names on voting lists. They then jump to the next conclusion—that the preponderance of registered Democrats in the 33 percent of that small nonrepresentative sample means that all faculty are bringing Democratic politics into the classroom.
Another favorite framing device used by these ideologues is to take one of the tools of instruction, say a course description or online syllabus, and draw conclusions about the entire complicated interplay of classroom phenomena known as learning. This research method is used in more than one of the “scientific” studies Lee considered.
Thus, in “How Many Ward Churchills?” the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reviews course descriptions, looking for code words like “activism,” “discrimination,” “gay issues,” “gender politics,” “Marxism,” “multiracial,” and “hate and evil.” It finds those words and asserts that the descriptions show how “narrow, single-minded and tendentious much of American higher education has become.”
Another study, by Stephen Balch of the National Association of Scholars, features the use of Googling to evaluate the frequency of college Web sites’ use of terms like diversity, freedom, democracy and so on. Balch also ran this analysis on media, business, religious and political Web sites. His conclusions seemed to suggest that universities are unpatriotic—more into diversity and multiculturism than freedom and democracy.
Question the source
These reports come from the well-funded right, groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the National Association of Scholars, the American Enterprise Institute (current resting place for Lynne Cheney), the Manhattan Institute and ACTA. These are not academic organizations and they don’t adhere to scientific rules and standards to ensure objectivity. The AFT and its partners in the Free Exchange on Campus coalition have held their work up to scrutiny in the past and found it filled with holes. (See, for example, “Facts Count: An Analysis of David Horowitz’s ‘The Professors’” at www.freeexchangeoncampus.org.)
In order to put this research into a scientific context, Lee created a framework for determining if the studies meet minimum research standards (see “The five rules of systematic observation”) that would allow an observer to accept the results. His findings—which the AFT is releasing this month in a report entitled “The ‘Faculty Bias’ Studies: Science or Propaganda?”—show:
• None of the eight reports meet all of the minimum research standards for a valid research study.
• Three of the reports meet none of the minimum research standards.
• Only three of the reports meet at least two of the minimum research standards.
Taken together, the best that these studies are able to suggest is that college faculty members are probably more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. Yet, even this conclusion is questionable because major groups in the higher education community are not taken into account. There are no community college teachers, or even faculty in less prestigious institutions, included in any of the samples. We know nothing about part-time faculty, who apparently also were not included. Given the low response rate, inadequate sampling and missing responses, it is not possible with any precision to calculate a ratio of Democrats to Republicans at the sampled institutions, much less imply what might be the case in institutions outside the sampling frame. Because of the flaws in the sample and response rates, we cannot be confident about the findings.
What’s more, a recently released peer-reviewed study by University of Akron sociologists John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick finds that, while there may be more liberals than conservatives on campus, the trend in the past 15 years has been for more faculty to move right—to the middle.
Each of the reviewed studies is flawed in its own way. Some of the publications are better than others when judged as research, but none give readers the confidence in the conclusions that a well-designed study should provide. To give a sense of how the studies fail, our chart (see Evaluation of the Studies) summarizes Lee’s findings and indicates whether the studies meet the criteria listed in the five research principles.
You can read Lee’s entire report at www.aft.org/higher_ed/pubs-reports.
Go to:
Summary of Studies
Evaluation of the Studies
Rules of Observation
