The Ideological Imbalance in the Academy is Even Worse than Many Critics Believe

Tyler Austin Harper of the Atlantic has a recent X thread in which he challenges progressives to recognize that academia is often closed to people with perspectives that diverge from progressive orthodoxy:

Here’s the brass tacks question progressive academics seem to want to avoid answering: does anyone seriously believe that a geographer critical of immigration would be likely to be hired by an elite American university? Or would those views put them at a profound disadvantage?

What about a pro-life ethicist whose work argues that abortion is murder, and who believes that bodily autonomy arguments do not override moral duties to the fetus? Would they be hirable in any Gender Studies department at any elite (non-religious) university in America? ….

Even in recognizing the problems, however, Harper adds in some common tropes that serves to understate it. Here’s the first one: “And of course conservative views are well-represented at certain places (e.g. George Mason) and in certain law schools and business schools.”

Conservative views are not “well-represented” at my university. If we include libertarian/free market views within the scope of “conservative,” they are well-represented at the law school and the economics department. But these two units are together a tiny (albeit publicly prominent) part of a university that serves forty thousand students. And to the extent the faculty’s views are salient, the rest of the university’s faculty is overwhelmingly left-wing, just as one would expect at a typical state university in the suburbs of a major left-leaning metro area. And if anything, administrators even moreso, as again is typical.

So one can’t properly use my university as the exception that proves the rule; it’s rather an example of a university that has two small enclaves of non-progressive-dominated thought. Don’t expect to find even one analogue to Todd Zywicki or Tyler Cowen in the History, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and other departments.

Harper also writes: “Universities and departments have to be more open to a wider spectrum of worldviews. (That includes viewpoint diversity in departments like economics!)”

This implies that Harper believe the myth, which I encounter all the time, that economics departments are bastion of free market, “right-wing” thought. It’s true that economics departments are more ideologically balanced that other university departments. But various studies conducted from 2003 to 2016 showed that the ration of Democrats to Republicans ranges from somewhere between 3 and 4.5 to 1. There is no reason to believe it’s become more balanced since.

Nor is it the case that economics professors are libertarian on economics, but progressive on everything else. As a study published in 2007 found:

People often suppose or imply that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists. We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data are broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Republican). Even the average Republican AEA member is “middle-of-the-road,” not free-market.

So kudos to Harper for stating and acknowledging the problem. But the ideological imbalance is even worse than he suggests. And contrary to what some apologists would have you believe, this is not simply the product of progressive ideas outcompeting non-progressive ones; at this point, a right-leaning college senior would have to be career-suicidal to contemplate pursuing an academic career in fields like anthropology or history, unless he wanted to keep his views to himself, in both his scholarship and personal interactions, indefinitely.

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