Last week, The New York Times published an article about liberal Baby Boomer professors retiring and the campus becoming a less polarized place (“The Sixties Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire,” by Patricia Cohen). In the comments section, Cohen weighed in on reasons why conservatives are such a minority in the university, and she stated:

“The question of why the faculty has been dominated by liberals is an interesting one that a lot of researchers have tried to explain. The study I find most revealing is one done by Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, both political scientists whom I mention at the end of my article. He is a conservative, so many of the accusations of bias that have been thrown around at other studies are not relevant here. He tried to examine all of the explanations that have been proposed: that there is outright discrimination against conservatives; that liberals have superior intelligence and abilities; that the minority status of conservatives makes college a less attractive environment and leads to a less satisfying college experience; that conservatives don’t earn as good grades because of their political views; that faculty do a better job of mentoring liberals and develop closer relationship with them and so on.

“They conclude that NONE of these explanations are valid, and argue that a person’s ideology is wrapped up with much more than simply voting preferences but also with certain personality characteristics and sensibilities.”

That’s a strangely absolute assertion—“NONE”—about the complex issue of bias. The reporter mentions “other studies,” yes, but doesn’t give them any credence in the article. In fact, if you look at that final sentence, you see that the second part of it is a modest statement that conservatives would agree to, and that it doesn’t support the “no validity” assertion at all. Who would disagree that ideology doesn’t involve personality and taste? Surveys of voter registration are crude measures of ideological position, and they are intended by the researchers as starting points, not end points. They are newsworthy, but superficial.

Furthermore, in the list of explanations, we don’t have anything about curriculum such as “The curriculum in the humanities and social sciences is heavy with liberal and progressivist assumptions that cast conservative ideas and approaches as wrong-headed or irrelevant or anti-intellectual . . .” Everything is about people and personalities.

We need more discussion of deep premises in, say, general education requirements, disciplinary boundaries, academic respectability. If liberal and progressive assumptions have become so customary that they have come to be identified with disciplinary foundations and academic etiquette, then the passing on of the Sixties generation may not have much difference at all in the real setting of ideological bias: the classroom.