Some of the commenters on previous posts on ideological bias in higher education have asked for more research evidence on the issue.  It’s a fair request, of course, but several studies of the problem are easily found with a quick Google search.  Type in “ideological bias ‘higher education’” and 35,000 hits come up.  I scanned the first several pages of search results and found lots of research links.

A handy compendium of the evidence appears in one volume entitled The Politically Correct University edted by Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding, and Frederick Hess. It comes from American Enterprise Institute, a think tank whose conservative orientation may automatically discredit the volume to many in higher education.  But the chapters contained in it strive for grounding in sound empirical studies, not in ideological premises.

Included are important surveys of faculty members by Carnegie Corporation, North American Academic Study Survey, Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, and many others.  One could add the annual numbers in the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s almanac.

Along with the empirical research, the contributors also raise numerous points about the general ideological climate and commitment on campus.  One of them throws the question of proof back upon people who say, “Show us the proof that conservatives are being discriminated against?”

As we know, one of the primary positions in discussions of discrimination today is “disparate outcomes.”  The argument says that if a body such as a police force, an entering freshman class, country club members, etc. has a disporportionately low representation of any identity group, then discrimination is at work.  It may not operate on the surface, and it may not happen through the actions of any particular individual, but the fact that, say, only 3 percent of the group is African American reveals bias.

What about the disparate-outcomes argument in ideological cases, then?  If a college faculty has only an eight-percent conservatives make-up, doesn’t that call for an investigation, a committee, a task force?  It certainly happens when other identity groups are under-represented.

Another defense says, “Well, sure, most profs lean to the left, but that doesn’t mean they bring their politics into the classroom.”

But this claim runs against thinking in the humanities that has dominated for 50 years.  It says that political and ideological commitments run deep, that they are often unconscious, that the assumption that we are able to suspend them is an Englightenment myth, that “the political” is everywhere, that buried idelogical premises shape so many things we take for granted that we don’t realize their workings . . .

All too often, the response to such rejoinders is like Professor Davidson’s in the previous post. A shrug, a joke, let’s move on. We now have a stalemate on the issue, with the evidence of imbalance so heavy it won’t go away, and the faculty-adminstrator resistance to taking it seriously so heavy that it won’t go away, either.

I predict that 10 years from now the exact same dynamic will be at work.