Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual "campuses are havens for left-leaning activists"

Conservatives on college campuses scored a tactical hit when the American Enterprise Institute's magazine published a survey of voter registration among humanities and social-science faculty members several years ago. More than nine out of 10 professors belonged to the Democratic or Green party, an imbalance that contradicted many liberal academics' protestations that diversity and pluralism abound in higher education. Further investigations by people like David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coupled with well-publicized cases of discrimination against conservative professors, reinforced the findings and set "intellectual diversity" on the agenda of state legislators and members of Congress.

The public has now picked up the message that "campuses are havens for left-leaning activists," according to a Chronicle poll of 1,000 adult Americans this year. Half of those surveyed -- 68 percent who call themselves "conservative" and even 30 percent who say they are "liberal" -- agreed that colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias into what they teach. The matter, however, is clearly not just one of perception. Indeed, in another recent survey, this one conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles, faculty members themselves chose as their commitment "far left" or "liberal" more than two and a half times as often as "far right" or "conservative." As a Chronicle article last month put it: "On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised."

Yet while the lack of conservative minds on college campuses is increasingly indisputable, the question remains: Why?

The obvious answer, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is that academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers. What allows them to do that, while at the same time they deny it, is that the bias takes a subtle form. Although I've met several conservative intellectuals in the last year who would love an academic post but have given up after years of trying, outright blackballing is rare. The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect filtering process that runs from graduate school to tenure and beyond.

Some fields' very constitutions rest on progressive politics and make it clear from the start that conservative outlooks will not do. Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies.

Other fields allow the possibility of studying conservative authors and ideas, but narrow the avenues of advancement. Mentors are disinclined to support your topic, conference announcements rarely appeal to your work, and few job descriptions match your profile. A fledgling literary scholar who studies anti-communist writing and concludes that its worth surpasses that of counterculture discourse in terms of the cogency of its ideas and morality of its implications won't go far in the application process.

No active or noisy elimination need occur, and no explicit queries about political orientation need be posed. Political orientation has been embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a political judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms. As an Americanist said in a committee meeting that I attended, "We can't hire anyone who doesn't do race," an assertion that had all the force of a scholastic dictum. Stanley Fish, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, advises, "The question you should ask professors is whether your work has influence or relevance" -- and while he raised it to argue that no liberal conspiracy in higher education exists, the question is bound to keep conservatives off the short list. For while studies of scholars like Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri seem central in the graduate seminar, studies of Friedrich A. von Hayek and Francis Fukuyama, whose names rarely appear on cultural-studies syllabi despite their influence on world affairs, seem irrelevant.

Academics may quibble over the hiring process, but voter registration shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a professional import. Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses, conservative opinion doesn't qualify as respectable inquiry. You won't often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields were created by the objects studied and by norms of research and peer review. Today, a political variable has been added, whereby conservative assumptions expel their holders from the academic market. A wall insulates the academic left from ideas and writings on the right.

One can see that phenomenon in how insiders, reacting to Horowitz's polls, displayed little evidence that they had ever read conservative texts or met a conservative thinker. Weblogs had entries conjecturing why conservatives avoid academe -- while never actually bothering to find one and ask -- as if they were some exotic breed whose absence lay rooted in an inscrutable mind-set. Professors offered caricatures of the conservative intelligentsia, selecting Ann H. Coulter and Rush Limbaugh as representatives, not von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb. One of them wrote that "conservatives of Horowitz's ilk want to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death."

Such parochialism and alarm are the outcome of a course of socialization that aligns liberalism with disciplinary standards and collegial mores. Liberal orthodoxy is not just a political outlook; it's a professional one. Rarely is its content discussed. The ordinary evolution of opinion -- expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them -- is lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety. With so many in harmony, and with those who agree joined also in a guild membership, liberal beliefs become academic manners. It's social life in a professional world, and its patterns are worth describing.

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.

The Common Assumption usually pans out and passes unnoticed -- except for those who don't share it, to whom it is an overt fact of professional life. Yet usually even they remain quiet in the face of the Common Assumption. There is no joy in breaking up fellow feeling, and the awkward pause that accompanies the moment when someone comes out of the conservative closet marks a quarantine that only the institutionally secure are willing to endure.

Sometimes, however, the Assumption steps over the line into arrogance, as when at a dinner a job candidate volunteered her description of a certain "racist, sexist, and homophobic" organization, and I admitted that I belonged to it. Or when two postdocs from Germany at a nearby university stopped by my office to talk about American literature. As they sat down and I commented on how quiet things were on the day before Thanksgiving, one muttered, "Yes, we call it American Genocide Day."

Such episodes reveal the argumentative hazards of the Assumption. Apart from the ill-mannered righteousness, academics with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom. An assertion of the genocidal motives of early English settlers is put forward not for discussion but for approval. If the audience shares the belief, all is well and good. But a lone dissenter disrupts the process and, merely by posing a question, can show just how cheap such a pat consensus actually is.

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among conservatives. "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won," she marveled. "I don't know anybody who voted for him." While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

The tendency applies to professors, especially in humanities departments, but with a twist. Although a liberal consensus reigns within, academics have an acute sense of how much their views clash with the majority of Americans. Some take pride in a posture of dissent and find noble precursors in civil rights, Students for a Democratic Society, and other such movements. But dissent from the mainstream has limited charms, especially after 24 years of center-right rule in Washington. Liberal professors want to be adversarial, but are tired of seclusion. Thus, many academics find a solution in a limited version of the False Consensus that says liberal belief reigns among intellectuals everywhere.

Such a consensus applies only to the thinking classes, union supporters, minority-group activists, and environmentalists against corporate powers. Professors cannot conceive that any person trained in critical thinking could listen to George W. Bush speak and still vote Republican. They do acknowledge one setting in which right-wing intellectual work happensnamely, the think tanksbut add that the labor there is patently corrupt. The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution all have corporate sponsors, they note, and fellows in residence do their bidding. Hence, references to "right-wing think tanks" are always accompanied by the qualifier "well-funded."

The dangers of aligning liberalism with higher thought are obvious. When a Duke University philosophy professor implied last February that conservatives tend toward stupidity, he confirmed the public opinion of academics as a self-regarding elite -- regardless of whether or not he was joking, as he later said that he was. When laymen scan course syllabi or search the shelves of college bookstores and find only a few volumes of traditionalist argument amid the thickets of leftist critique, they wonder whether students ever enjoy a fruitful encounter with conservative thought. When a conference panel is convened or a collection is published on a controversial subject, and all the participants and contributors stand on one side of the issue, the tendentiousness is striking to everyone except those involved. The False Consensus does its work, but has an opposite effect. Instead of uniting academics with a broader public, it isolates them as a ritualized club.

The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That lawas Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has describedpredicts that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs. In a product-liability trial, for example, if nine jurors believe the manufacturer is somewhat guilty and three believe it is entirely guilty, the latter will draw the former toward a larger award than the nine would allow on their own. If people who object in varying degrees to the war in Iraq convene to debate methods of protest, all will emerge from the discussion more resolved against the war.

Group Polarization happens so smoothly on campuses that those involved lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion. A librarian at Ohio State University who announces, "White Americans pay too little attention to the benefits their skin color gives them, and opening their eyes to their privileged status is a valid part of a college education" (The Chronicle, August 6) seems to have no idea how extreme his vision sounds to many ears. Deliberations among groups are just as prone to tone deafness. The annual resolutions of the Modern Language Association's Delegate Assembly, for example, ring with indignation over practices that enjoy popular acceptance. Last year, charging that in wartime, governments use language to "misrepresent policies" and "stigmatize dissent," one resolution urged faculty members to conduct "critical analysis of war talk ... as appropriate, in classrooms." However high-minded the delegates felt as they tallied the vote, which passed 122 to 8 without discussion, to outsiders the resolution seemed merely a license for more proselytizing.

The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate -- instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they're stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren.

As things stand, such behaviors shift in a left direction, but they could just as well move right if conservatives had the extent of control that liberals do now. The phenomenon that I have described is not so much a political matter as a social dynamic; any political position that dominates an institution without dissent deterioriates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. The solution is an intellectual climate in which the worst tendencies of group psychology are neutralized.

That doesn't mean establishing affirmative action for conservative scholars or encouraging greater market forces in education -- which violate conservative values as much as they do liberal values. Rather, it calls for academics to recognize that a one-party campus is bad for the intellectual health of everyone. Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with compatriots, the more one's mind narrows. The great liberal John Stuart Mill identified its insulating effect as a failure of imagination: "They have never thrown themselves into the mental condition of those who think differently from them." With adversaries so few and opposing ideas so disposable, a reverse advantage sets in. The majority expands its power throughout the institution, but its thinking grows routine and parochial. The minority is excluded, but its thinking is tested and toughened. Being the lone dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire sure facts, crisp arguments, and a thick skin.

But we can't open the university to conservative ideas and persons by outside command. That would poison the atmosphere and jeopardize the ideals of free inquiry. Leftist bias evolved within the protocols of academic practice (though not without intimidation), and conservative challenges should evolve in the same way. There are no administrative or professional reasons to bring conservatism into academe, to be sure, but there are good intellectual and social reasons for doing so.

Those reasons are, in brief: One, a wider spectrum of opinion accords with the claims of diversity. Two, facing real antagonists strengthens one's own position. Three, to earn a public role in American society, professors must engage the full range of public opinion.

Finally, to create a livelier climate on the campus, professors must end the routine setups that pass for dialogue. Panels on issues like Iraq, racism, imperialism, and terrorism that stack the dais provide lots of passion, but little excitement. Syllabi that include the same roster of voices make learning ever more desultory. Add a few rightists, and the debate picks up. Perhaps that is the most persuasive internal case for infusing conservatism into academic discourse and activities. Without genuine dissent in the classroom and the committee room, academic life is simply boring.

IMO the way to beat this rap is to re-define "serious academic pursuits" to fit the original reason people attended University: to become educated for life, not to learn a trade. Now that the adults are regaining control of North America, we need to encourage the same techniques that brought us to this impasse in the beginning: question the 'relevance' of the subject matter to the reason we are at University. Will "womens' studies" improve my relationship to the world, or will a Great Books seminar using the same Great Books list we used to use when women didn't work and book clubs flourished? When book clubs are established, we need to encourage the reading of 'relevant' books that will bring the culture together, not subdivide it. Critical thinking must be brought back to 'relevance', along with spelling, vocabulary, the dictionary, and the fact that words have meanings that can be nailed down. We must point out the many, many occasions on which people say "tow the line" and not "toe the line", "wreckless driving" and not "reckless driving", "poured over the documents" and not "pored over...", "baited breath" and not "bated breath", etc. -- and explain what the phrase means; we must teach people where such phrases come from as "He justs at scars that never felt a wound"; and above all we must work hard to get blasphemy, profanity and obscenity back to the fringes of society. All of these are things we as individual educated people can do. (I do them daily, as my work requires a lot of writing and reading and arguing). Auditing classes is a good idea too. I took a night course in Economics for a CLE credit, in which the majority of the students were working people, and the professor was frequently interrupted by someone pointing out that "that doesn't work in reality" or "I have never seen anything like that in my business". Finally the professor exploded that reality had nothing to do with it -- we were there to learn what was in the book and pass the exam at the end! That opened the eyes of the students who were not involved in daily business and several good after-class dialogues began.

Another thing that needs to be brought back to the university is requiring on-campus living for the first two years. Being forced together with people who don't believe as you believe, and having the tools to argue and debate in 'bull sessions' in an informal atmosphere (and with the aforementioned marginalization of obscenity, blasphemy and 'you are stupid' type rejoinders) would go a long way to opening the doors of closed minds that didn't even know they were closed. My dad, who was born and reared in Wisconsin, said the Army did more for the opening of closed minds than anything else he had ever experienced, forcing people to live togther and get along together who had vastly different ideas of the world. Dorm life did the same for me -- the only Republican in my dorm, as I remember it, but one taught to defend her position and well grounded to back pu her points-- and would help a lot of other young brainwashed high school kids.

But above all the need from parents is to take an active hand in where your children go to school. Like the woman who takes a six figure job and leaves the rearing of her children to an illegal alien from Guatamala, sending your kids to Harvard and ignoring what they are learning there is not doing them any good at all. You gave birth to them; you owe them your full attention until they are capable of standing on their own with the ability to hold their own with the world.

I agree with this but in my case it happened in the late 50's
when a history teacher assigned us to look at a pro-abortion program on TV. My father, a staunchly conservative Roman Catholic, refused and wrote a letter to the guy telling him to stick to history and stop trying to propagandize his dauaghter. The professor then blackballed my entrance into Nat'l Honor Society as a junior and I had to wait for Senior year to be enducted. No wonder I decided to specialize in Math / Physics in college: no propaganda allowed there!
If you care about the mental/emotional health of your children not to mention their faith, get them out of public schools and teach them yourselves. No matter what your skills, you can't possibly do worse than they!

Great article. I have libertarian leanings and have taught a course on civil rights at a university in central New Jersey for the past three years as an adjunct professor (I am a full time lawyer outside the classroom for one of those evil capitalist corporations). This university is one of the worst campuses in terms of radical, off-the-wall leftist faculty members. But I don't feel constrained to "groupthink" like other full-time faculty -- and always tell my students that unlike other professors there, I have a "real job" and don't have to worry about getting tenure; so I can say whatever I want. But I have not received a single complaint in three years -- to the contrary, the course has been extremely well-received by students. I tell the students to THINK FOR THEMSELVES -- and they look at me as if no faculty member has ever said that to them before. I tell them to always question what they read in newspapers, whether liberal or conservative. The class focuses on all the hot issues of the day -- abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage, free speech -- and I can tell you the students out there, despite their mostly progressive leanings, are truly open to entertaining alternative points of view provided they don't think they will be "penalized" for expressing different views. And students seem genuinely relieved that they are not being condescended to in a dogmatic, liberal way. They seem to find it refreshing that they are not being mindlessly spoon-fed by someone with a clear ideological agenda; my only agenda is that I have NO agenda, just think for yourself. So the one thing this discussions is missing is that we don't give college students enough credit for being able to think for themselves if given the opportunity; they just don't have many opportunities because faculty members do everything possible to make clear that dissenting views will not be tolerated. Why risk a lower GPA? Better just shut down intellectually and say what you think the professor wants to hear. But when someone comes in and tells them to think for themselves, they feel empowered and open up. That's what the education process is supposed to be about.

The liberal leftist hiring biases on college campuses are the most discriminatory hiring practices in America today. I would advocate a neutral board at the head of the university that would have to approve all new faculty hires and in some cases would do the hiring, bypassing the head of a department.

EXAMPLE:Bypass the head of the English and History Departments for a few years until they agree to hire regardless of political view points. Might even get a few serious Christians on the faculty this way.

The liberals always talk about role models, how public schools need black teachers for Black students and Hispanic teachers for Hispanic students. In the Universities they are are not hiring conservative role models for the students

They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.

A quote from the George Will article. Yes, it is good to reprint this article here again at FR.

The tone-deaf part of this rings true at my institution. I sent this article to a liberal philosopher, thinking that he might, as a philosopher, see this situation from a new perspective. He just said "This is nothing new." As if he wondered why I sent it to him. Nowhere did he acknowledge the need to change things in the least. This is from someone who was shocked to discover that I was an anti-Marxist. It was just assumed that everyone supported Marxism.

I sometimes wonder if it is wise to inject conservative politics into my humanities classes. I do so only obliquely, when the artwork can be related to modern politics, and only rarely more obviously, as when we are discussing those works created under Communism. But the political discussion board I set up to further discussion has no replies at all. Alas. I am looking forward to seeing what students say in their exams. I do tolerate different viewpoints; I just want ideas supported with specific examples and details. We'll see.

No one is proposing force. I appreciate your comments but I'm afraid your diagnosis of the problem is simplistic; I went to Berkeley despite being a conservative. I had far more important criteria when selecting a university than partisan bias. So more information isn't going to change anything.

We love the free market and assume that it can solve all ills. Choice and competition. It's not always that easy. The kinds of people that forsake the private sector for university professorship at ALL universities have a liberal bent. Living in an ivory tower only reinforces this leaning. Therefore, more creative thinking is necessary in order to eliminate bias on campus.

The points of control in a university are at its source of funding. Alumni giving is a big part of this. Interpose conservatives at this choke point and you have leverage.

These liberal professors should heed the advice of Aaron Tippin.

You get up every morning 'fore the sun comes up
Toss a lunchbox into a pickup truck
A long, hard day sure ain't much fun
But you've gotta get it started if you wanna get it done
You set your mind and roll up your sleeves
You're workin' on a working man's Ph.D.

With your heart in your hands and the sweat on your brow
You build the things that really make the world go around
If it works, if it runs, if it lasts for years
You bet your bottom dollar it was made right here
With pride, honor and dignity
From a man with a working man's Ph.D.

Now there ain't no shame in a job well done
From driving a nail to driving a truck
As a matter of fact I'd like to set things straight
A few more people should be pullin' their weight
If you wanna cram course in reality
You get yourself a working man's Ph.D.

When the quittin' whistle blows and the dust settles down
There ain't no trophies or cheering crowds
You'll face yourself at the end of the day
And be damn proud of whatever you've made
Can't hang it on the wall for the world to see
But you've got yourself a working man's Ph.D.

Now there ain't no shame in a job well done
From driving a nail to driving a truck
As a matter of fact I'd like to set things straight
A few more people should be pullin' their weight
If you wanna cram course in reality
You get yourself a working man's Ph.D.

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