Credentials, But Not Community, for Conservatives in the Academy

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | April 8, 2020 | Fabio Rojas

[karpov]

People like to tell a few stories about academic conservatives. Within the progressive left, one story is about the influence of corporate interests and “neoliberalism” on the university. In their view, academia is consumed by market forces.

That view, in my opinion, is vastly mistaken. Universities rely on a combination of tuition, state funding, and grants to keep the doors open. Rather than operating as for-profit firms, university activity, such as teaching and research, are determined by workers—the faculty—not by shareholders. The “neoliberal” framing of the universities also ignores that most professors and administrators lean left far more than the general population. For progressive critics of the university, conservative faculty members are a symptom of a more general degeneration of the university.

The counter-narrative, pushed by some conservative media outlets, is that conservatives are a beleaguered minority. According to critics, armies of leftist professors punish upstanding conservative students for their views. They give low grades to essays written by conservative students who disagree with Marxist instructors, and rampaging hordes of leftist professors hound anyone who dares to disagree with a politically correct orthodoxy.

Those conservative outlets point to genuine examples of leftist extremism as evidence that the entire system is rigged against them. That view is also in error. Much of academia doesn’t care about a student’s political views; their chemistry TA doesn’t. Research on academic conservatives, such as Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University by Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn, Sr., finds that academic conservatives tend to find their department friendly. And of course, if academia really hates conservative students, why do millions and millions of people manage to graduate from college and go on to great careers?

[Albion Wilde]

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