Last October, when Closed Minds: Politics and Ideology in American Universities, appeared, it received prominent coverage in the press, including stories in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle story also included as-yet unpublished research from April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner on student reactions to the political atittudes of professors. The Chronicle headline over Robin Wilson’s story announced, “Professors’ Politics Don’t Dominate the Classroom,” and the headline for Pattie Cohen’s story in The Times ran, “Professors’ Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not.”

The data in the two studies remain to be assimilated to the debate over campus bias, but a modification of beginning premises in the stories is in order before the issue can be tackled. In Robin’s account, we have reference to “the long-running allegation by conservative critics that higher education is full of liberal professors who try to indoctrinate students.” And Pattie’s piece opens, “An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students.”

This is too strong. Yes, in some public arenas and among off-campus critics, the allegation of bias has centered on overt indoctrination by proselytizing professors. But move past those settings and individuals, and the bias argument shifts decidedly. There, attitudes against conservatism and libertarianism are taken to operate at a subtler, quieter, less personal level. Instead of worrying about an agenda-driven professor pushing anti-Republican tirades on helpless sophomores, critics understand bias more in terms of curricular choices. That is, they worry about the materials, texts, ideas, and topics brought into the classroom coming mostly from the left side of the spectrum and having a normative effect on student learning without the students even recognizing it — and without the faculty recognizing it, either.

In the New York Times article, Daniel Klein gets close in stating that “social democratic ideas dominate universities.” In my field of English, it’s a case of certain cultural values and beliefs shaping curriculum from the start. It happens, for instance, when all the readings in a cultural-theory course emphasize postmodernist, social constructionist, group identitarian, or progressivist perspectives. Those readings might contradict one another in various ways, and thus appear to form a broad range of thinking about culture and interpretation. When they fill up the syllabus, then, students (and, again, the faculty who have themselves been trained in these materials) come to believe that they are fully representative of respectable thinking at the present time. They don’t have the chance to explore, precisely, perspectives that come from the other side of the range of understandings — the contrary to postmodernist being Enlightenment thinking (in matters of objectivity and scientific universals), social constructionist being realist (in matters of epistemology), group identitarian being humanist (in matters of human nature), and progressivist being traditionalist (in matters of canonicity).

These latter are more or less conservative today (although in earlier periods they might be termed “liberal”), and they are far overshadowed by the former in humanities classes. Their eclipse, though, isn’t registered by discussions and commentaries that cast bias in terms of “political views,” as Republican vs. Democrat, and that describe bias in action as pushing certain overt policies and preferences in classrooms.

This is to say that the left-wing orientation operates at a disciplinary level somewhat opaque to outside observers. And, because insiders have passed through many, many years of acculturation into the discipline, they, too, don’t realize the tendentiousness of their curricular preferences. As the Chronicle story noted, “The survey found that 95 percent of professors believe that they are ‘honest brokers’ among competing views.”

A quick glance at the syllabi of methodological and foundational courses in the humanities prevents that 95 percent claim from standing up. And yet, I have no doubt that most all of those professors genuinely believe in their own respect for “competing views.”