University of Akron Professors John F. Zipp (professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology) and Rudy Fenwick (associate professor of Sociology and Chair of the University of Akron Faculty Senate), have just released a new study examining the question of the "political bias" of faculty in higher education.  The study, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, is entitled Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors.   We recently got to a chance to ask professors Zipp and Fenwick about the study.

Interview with Professors Zipp and Fenwick 

FE:  Thanks for taking some time to talk about your recent project.  Can you tell us a little bit about what you set out to examine with your research and why you decided to take on this project?

JZ and RF: 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 to 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) 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.

What added  urgency to this project was the introduction of a version of David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" in the Ohio State Legislature in early 2005. When we looked at the preliminary results of the Carnegie data that 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," 2/14/05) 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 university policies.         

FE:  What were the basic findings of your research?

JZ and RF: We have several key findings:

(1) although liberal faculty outnumber conservatives (2.3 to 2.6 to 1 in the most recent data), between 1989 and 1997, there was increased movement to the center among faculty;

(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; and

(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 or an appreciation of literature and the arts, and less supportive of tenure and the free exchange of ideas in the classroom.

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

JZ and RF: 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 (except for the basic percentages, the most recent 2005 data from UCLA were not publicly available for analysis). These are hardly the monolithic 7 to 1 or 10 to 1 ratios given by conservative commentators.

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

(3) Likewise, types of higher educational 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% 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 demographics in ways that produce somewhat offsetting trends: younger faculty are less liberal than older faculty, while women faculty- an increasing percentage of faculty- are more liberal than male faculty.        

FE:  These conclusions seem different from previous studies that have claimed very significant differences between the number of liberal and conservative faculty.  Have those studies overstated the case?

JZ and RF: 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 have 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 that conservatives overstated and clearly misrepresented their case that we haven't mentioned yet. While their claim is that faculty have a monolithic liberal/leftist political orientation, what all of 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 2 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. 

FE:  The second part of your study looks at whether or not 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?

JZ and RF: 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 with anecdotal evidence.  In contrast, we used national survey data to analyze the importance that faculty saw for 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 for 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 and 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 more guilty of the charges that conservative critics have leveled at liberal academics.

FE:  We would like to hear a bit more about your methodology--not so much 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?

JZ and RF: 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 more 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).

FE:  Thanks again, for taking the time to answer our questions about the article.   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?

JZ and RF: As we mentioned above, this article is timely because of the recent attack on academic freedom by conservative critics of higher education.  Bills have been introduced in state legislatures, with Pennsylvania having a widely-publicized set of hearings.  Public policy is being debated and laws are being proposed based on rather scant evidence.

There are two other issues that warrant our attention; although we don't address either directly in this paper, they are the subject of a forthcoming book chapter that we are just completing.  The first is: What, and who, is behind the attacks on faculty politics? Do critics like David Horowitz speak for 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 other have offered are anecdotal incidences, and most of these have been disproved.

The best way to look at this is, as Deep Throat told Woodward in All the President's Men, to "follow the money."   If one does this with Horowitz and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 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 was also the major source of funding for Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve. Overall, it 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.        

A second and related point is that the considerable discussion over how liberal faculty undermine academic freedom has deflected public attention and the gaze of policy makers 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 growth and 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.

FE:  Thanks again to professors Zipp and Fenwick for their work and for their time.