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January-February 2008
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The Rise of Faculty CentrismPolitically, U.S. professors are less liberal than many people believe, but their ranks also include fewer conservatives than in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, centrism is ascendant among faculty members under the age of 35. These are among the conclusions of a major new national study of professors and their politics, also the topic of an October 6 symposium at Harvard organized by the study’s authors, assistant professor of sociology Neil Gross and Solon J. Simmons, assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University.
But recent decades, Gross and Simmons argue, have brought a reactionary targeting of liberal academicians: “[a] conservative strategy of attempting to influence public opinion on a wide variety of matters by starting think-tanks—most independent of academe—funded by conservative foundations that build and then leverage ties to the increasingly consolidated mass media in order to get their message across; and…the rhetorical strategy that accompanied this institution-building eff ort, of calling into question the legitimacy of intellectuals on the other side of the political aisle who would contest conservative claims.” A wave of faculty studies that appeared in the context of this new order were, according to Gross and Solon, “closer to thinly disguised works of political advocacy intended to back up the charge of liberal bias in academe” than to “thoughtful scientific investigations.”
Moderates Emergent
Their own study, which the Chronicle of Higher Education described as “arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s,” found that 44 percent of faculty members today are self-described liberal, 46 percent are moderate, and 9 percent are conservative. Only 20 percent voted for George Bush in 2004. The rise in centrism, the study authors say, seems to have come at the expense of conservatives.
While the nearly steady number of liberals teaching in higher education might have been expected, there were surprises. On the question of affirmative action in college admissions, for example, the study (with funding from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation) found, after surveying 1,417 faculty members at 927 colleges, that professors are nearly split on the issue. As compared to the general population, they are also more conservative on certain issues of economic policy. Less than half agreed with the statement, “Business corporations make too much profit,” compared to two-thirds of the American public. In other ways, however, faculty members lean sharply left. Eighty percent believe President Bush misled the American people about the reasons to go to war in Iraq, and 75 percent think having an abortion should be legal “if a woman wants it for any reason.” 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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The study, says Gross, was intended to move discussions about professors’ political views “away from partisan polemic and back toward rigorous social science.” The seminal comprehensive survey in this area was conducted in 1969 by Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset, who found that professors were more liberal than members of many other occupations: at that time, “46 percent of professors described their overall political identity as left or liberal, 27 percent as middle of the road, and 28 percent as conservative, with younger faculty members more liberal than older ones.”