Just 3 decades ago, only 42% of academics were liberal. Now, 60% of academics are liberals, while only 12% are conservatives. Academics are trained to rigorously pursue truth. Is their disproportionate liberal slant a failure of academia or a success of the liberal movement?
Conservatives dismiss this figure as a failure of academia, succumbing to left-wing bias, and dismiss serious academia as liberal indoctrination.
Liberals respond by saying that the left always is right because reality favors them—it may simply be that reality has a left-wing bias!
We can take a look at the left’s empirical track record on a few issues:
Climate change - climate change being artificially induced is a view that’s overwhelmingly held by liberals; it happens to carry massive scientific backing
Vaccines - vaccines save 6 lives every minute; anti-vaxxers are almost ubiquitously conservative
Evolution - an established scientific theory; deniers of evolution are also nearly unanimously conservative.
Simply becoming an expert on issues like climate change leads you to reject widely held conservative views because they are devoid of empirical backing; 65% of Republicans don’t even acknowledge that global warming is largely artificial. Conservatives denying basic scientific truths, however, doesn’t mean that liberal policies are right—70% of wind power generation comes from red states—conservatives do have support for increasing green energy because it’s the future, regardless of climate change denialism.
There is a gap between winning on empirics and winning on policy. Liberals undeniably have better empirics as a result of conservatives abandoning intellectual spaces, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into better policies at all. Accepting climate change as anthropogenically driven has nothing to do with whether carbon taxes, nuclear investment, or green subsidies should be implemented in climate policy.
Academic institutions, if they happened to be flawless, wouldn’t turn people into liberals. They certainly wouldn’t produce many serious scholars who align themselves with conservative populism or wokeness, but lots of traditional conservative principles have, for centuries, been head-to-head with liberal ones in terms of analytical and logical basis. The fact that conservatism is such a widely-held, longstanding worldview means it must’ve been able to have held its ground before contemporary conservatives abandoned educational institutions, so conservative policies can be just as good, if not better than liberal ones.
Proving that liberal ideas are more correct than conservative ideas currently doesn’t suffice; conservatives still deserve to have ideas promoted and heard due to the intrinsic value of thought diversity.
A lack of thought diversity within academia undeniably undermines academia’s ability to self-correct and reason towards correct conclusions. Even if academia’s liberal slant turned out to be right on 99 out of 100 issues (gratuitous ratio), attaching empirical value to a political ideology is self-evidently damaging. Liberalism is a movement that, like all political movements, can change arbitrarily in terms of policy positions for reasons that usually don’t include serious academic debate and literature. Democrats were the pro-slavery party during the 19th century and supported eugenics during the early 20th century.
Here’s an analogy that proves my overall point quite well.
You want to create the best team possible. Right now, team A is beating team B every single game. The best decision in this case would not be to eliminate team B from the competition, since that would leave you with team A that’s free to do anything arbitrary without fearing loss. You would keep team A and B competing to the best of their ability—competition in a marketplace of ideas is the best way to allow the best ones to win out; we have no idea which ideas to eliminate before they’ve even competed rigorously yet.
I, as a liberal myself, have a little more respect for those on the right complaining about left-wing bias in academia, since dismissing concerns of academic bias as “you’re mad we’re right about all of this, smart people overwhelmingly agree with us” strikes me as dogmatic and dismissive.
Now, it is true that the modern-day conservative movement has almost ubiquitously abandoned the principles of classical conservatism and turned towards populist policies with much less epistemic backing—it’s quite obvious that most academia-denialism can be attributed back to conservatives. Liberals aren’t the ones denying the efficacy of vaccines, claiming climate change is a hoax, and spreading lies about chemtrails. If you were to discuss a topic such as, for example, minimum wage increases with a conservative who’s heavily involved in academia, they have a high chance of bringing up points like this:
“A 2021 meta-analysis by Neumark and Shirley finds that up to 80% studies show that minimum wage increases have negative effects on employment, especially among young and less-educated workers.”
If you had to discuss the same topic with a conservative on Twitter X who resents academia as Marxist indoctrination and, therefore, refuses to get involved with it, the response looks more like this:
“All these academics you cite are from left-wing echo chambers that want to indoctrinate kids into Marxists, keep spewing your bullshit libTARD!!!”
Conservatives have increasingly shifted towards using the second response, and you can’t really blame them. If you’re not willing to maintain something close to an ideological equilibrium and stay staunchly committed to free speech within real intellectual spaces, people who hold ‘intolerable’ viewpoints will become increasingly less able to construct sound arguments for ideas they find acceptable. Overton windows increasingly drift leftward (which leaves an ever further gap between academia and the general public’s political Overton), and largely moderate right-wing ideas can be arbitrarily discarded as ‘unengagable’, on par with ideas like slavery. This means that:
Conservatives will have a shortage of serious intellectuals who raise the standard of conservative advocacy.
Conservatives will now largely abandon academia and see it as useless, since the space seems rigged against them.
The broader conservative movement now has no intellectual anchors to keep it largely grounded in facts. Conservatives turn towards populist strongmen who aren’t concerned with being truthful advocates.
Reality tells us that we’re already seeing this shift now from the right and left! Leftists will dismiss conservative ideas that can be rationally argued for as too far to the right, and conservatives will shift towards movements that are isolated from reality.
Academia should skew towards the middle, fact-checking extremist nonsense and adding much-needed context/clarity on policy topics—something AI chatbots do, as the general public’s trust in LLMs has not eroded yet; academics should select for partisan discourse only where most rational people can rationally disagree on something. Instead, academia is polarizing political discourse by entrenching pro-academics in more leftist positions while entrenching people with less interest in academia in more rightist positions.
Hyper-leftist woke policies are already degrading academic institutions in another way—discarding rigor for optimized racial compositions. UCLA’s medical school dropped from 6th nationally to 18th after failure rates on medical tests skyrocketed, a consequence of DEI-style policies prioritizing diversity over merit in admissions. Due to the same woke reasoning that creates these policies, discussing the efficacy of such policies is looked down upon, immunizing certain ideas from real criticism.
Wokeism also tends to be more susceptible to creating academic bias, as they have a low tolerance for opposing viewpoints, prioritizing certain views that emphasize inclusion and shutting down marketplaces of ideas solely because some of the items sold are ‘microaggressive’ or ‘offensive’.
The prior empirical value of the statement “academia has a liberal bias” doesn’t matter so long as it’s self-affirming—over 88% of students admitted to holding leftist views for social and academic affirmation. If those students push out dogmatic progressive beliefs, academia turns into a liberally biased echo chamber regardless of whether or not they believe in the literature they’re pushing out; their literature will then tend to be empirically worse than if they actually believed such ideas, since the only reason they adopt them is that they’re more progressive.
Academic institutions should be trying to reverse their current trajectory of partisan drift—they should be marketplaces of ideas that can produce the best ideas and convert them into the best policies possible. Classical conservative ideas shouldn’t be artificially inflated for intellectual diversity, but they should be able to fairly compete with liberal ideas so that Republicans and Democrats can create rational policies, only having to fight over topics that matter.
Liberalism’s future empirical track record and the utility of academic thought are at risk if they artificially weaken their best competition; the once-rational left will continue descending into dogma. There is a real risk of academic institutions becoming liberal echo chambers. For decades, academia has been democracy’s greatest asset—when you have intellectual marketplaces that value free speech and rational thought above all else, great ideas will emerge. It’s up to those on the left and right to preserve it.
I am conservative by nature, and yes I’ve barely had any college. But I’ve listened to many that did.
The ‘conservative’ political party is not a good assessment for what conservatism actually is, so intelligent/educated conservatives often shy away from the label in order to try to avoid getting looped into the stupidity.
Also a significant quantity of teachers are liberal by nature and a great deal of them have no issue at all pushing their beliefs in the class. I’ve seen and heard assignments where questions were so leadingly labeled that almost any attempt at a conservative answer makes you look like a jackass.
There is definitely some liberal push in education, considering the ‘caring-ness’ needed and often lower pay rates teachers get it’s completely expected. Foisting one’s beliefs onto those in your care is also an age old human tradition, and conservative teachers are generally of the nature not to do that because true conservatives don’t like rubbing it in people’s faces and trying heavily influence their development.
That being said. Even as a conservative I respect liberal views, a lot of them are wonderful ideals, accomplishing them without self destruction is the difficult part.
For me, it is the dogmatic approach to academia, and liberalism in general, that has been off putting. As a UC Santa Cruz (under!)graduate and a Lewis and Clark (law!) grad, I'm proud of my radical educations!
But lately people aren't thinking of new ways to improve the world, they're picking on people for not supporting the "correct" way of speaking, of thinking, of living (and of not reading the right books, or of backing the "right" people when you're not sure they have done anything beyond say the "right" things...
As someone raising goobers right now, I feel safer in a liberal society to a point... but sometimes people go overboard, and get so caught up in teaching social issues that they are quite literally forgetting to teach people how to read.
Charter schools that adopted anti-racism curriculum have lower literacy rates among BIPOC students than BIPOC students who attend charter schools who focused on traditional reading/literacy models. Academics need to wait to teach social issues after students have actually been taught the basics. There is room for everything, but the order it is taught in matters. This was an important topic, thanks for sharing it.