How Campus Dogma Distorts Teaching and Research

The ideological tilt of academe is striking. Today, 60 percent of faculty identify as far left or liberal and just 12 percent as conservative. Fifty-four percent of humanities faculty and 45 percent of social sciences faculty say that terms such as “radical,” “activist,” “Marxist,” or “socialist” describe them at least moderately well. Republicans make up just 6 percent of political science faculty (and even less of history or literature faculty). While complaints about a campus monoculture are nothing new, higher ed’s defenders are prone to argue that progressive bias doesn’t ultimately matter because scholars are professionals who don’t allow their personal views to color their teaching or research. Indeed, some prominent campus voices dismiss talk of viewpoint diversity as a “ MAGA plot .” To sort through all this, AEI last week hosted a webinar on why higher education’s ideological tilt matters for academic research and teaching, featuring three scholars who’ve tackled this topic over the past year: Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute; the Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Minella; and Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College. Their findings suggest that airy claims of scholarly detachment and neutrality miss the mark. Collectively, the researchers described a teaching and research enterprise warped by ideological dogma. Take teaching. Last year, Shields and two colleagues dove into 27 million college syllabi to  examine  the texts college students are assigned to read on controversial topics like criminal justice and abortion. The most widely assigned texts were celebrated left-leaning works like Michelle Alexander’s  The New Jim Crow . But the team was more interested in how frequently these canonical progressive works were paired with “their most important intellectual critics.” The answer? Rarely. Nine times out of ten, no works are assigned that offer a competing perspective. As they explain, “It seems that professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreements . . .  That is the academic norm , at least in the cases we studied.” Bias also creeps into research. This spring, Kahlenberg and a co-author examined  every article published between 2022 and 2024 by the flagship journal of American studies,  The American Quarterly . They discovered that 80 percent of articles were explicitly critical, luxuriating in America’s “racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia.” They could find not a single positive article. Kahlenberg reflected, “There was no curiosity about why, year after year, people rate America as the desired destination for people who want to immigrate. No curiosity about why, with 4 percent of the population in the world, we get 42 percent of individual Nobel Prizes.” While the authors disapprove of President Trump’s “one-sided” approach to US history, they concluded that the American studies field “engages in the same sort of distortion as Trump does, only in reverse.” The monoculture is also self-perpetuating. Minella discussed his recent research on the American Political Science Review , the most influential scholarly journal in political science. From 2020 to 2024, a group of editors calling itself the “Feminist Collective” explicitly promised to evaluate scholarly submissions based on the author’s race and sex and sought to refocus the journal on identity and oppression. Minella’s analysis of the 549 articles published during that period found that 132 addressed “race, gender, systemic oppression, and related topics,” while just three focused on the US Constitution. As Minella observed, “Academic journals are gatekeepers.” When a top journal embraces ideological scholarship, “that drives the kind of dissertations that are written by people that want to get jobs.” What should be done?  The panelists offered several ideas for campus leaders: Regularly review what’s included in campus curricula. The reality is that most board members, presidents, and provosts have no idea what’s being taught. Incentivize principled, moderate professors to teach courses on contentious issues, perhaps through course development grants. It is probably unrealistic to expect activist faculty, who currently teach these courses, to alter their ways. Ensure that tenure and promotion pay more attention to faculty teaching, not just their success at publishing barely-read articles in peer-reviewed journals. Invest in campus “ schools of civic thought ,” which attract a more heterodox faculty due to their scholarly focus on topics like classical liberalism and American founding principles. State officials seeking a more direct approach could also consider barring faculty at public institutions from using publicly-administered funds to belong to academic associations, attend academic conferences, or subscribe to scholarly journals that take formal political stands or engage in explicit political advocacy. There’s much work to be done, and these ideas are only starting points. But the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that there is one. That’s what makes this research so useful. The post How Campus Dogma Distorts Teaching and Research appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .