We previously discussed how surveys at universities show a virtual purging of conservative and Republican faculty members. Last year, the Harvard Crimson noted that the university had virtually eliminated Republicans from most departments but that the lack of diversity was not a problem. Now, a new survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson shows that more than three-quarters of Harvard Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty respondents identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 2.5% identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
A recent Gallup poll stated, “Roughly equal proportions of U.S. adults identified as conservative (36%) and moderate (35%) in Gallup polling throughout 2022, while about a quarter identified as liberal (26%).”
Compare that to this survey, which is consistent with many other schools. Nationally, less than a third of Americans identify as “liberal” but Harvard and other schools show over twice that percentage on the faculty. That does not happen randomly. It takes a consistent culture of intolerance for opposing viewpoints. Indeed, there is a greater percentage of faculty who identify as “very liberal” than citizens overall identify as “liberal.” Less than three percent identify as “conservative’ rather than 35% nationally.
The trend is the result of hiring systems where conservative or libertarian scholars are often rejected as simply “insufficiently intellectually rigorous” or “not interesting” in their scholarship. This can clearly be true with individual candidates but the wholesale reduction of such scholars shows a more systemic problem. Faculty insist that there is no bias against conservatives, but the obviously falling number of conservative faculty speaks for itself.
The editors of the legal site Above the Law have repeatedly swatted down objections to the loss of free speech and viewpoint diversity in the media and academia. In a recent column, they mocked those of us who objected to the virtual absence of conservative or libertarian faculty members at law schools.
Senior editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” based on the fact that liberal views reflect real law as opposed to junk law. (Patrice regularly calls those with opposing views “racists,” including Chief Justice John Roberts because of his objection to race-based criteria in admissions as racial discrimination). He explained that hiring a conservative academic was akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism (or that the sun orbits the earth) to teach at a university.
It is that easy. You simply declare that conservative views shared by a majority of the Supreme Court and roughly half of the population are not acceptable to be taught.
I frankly do not understand why professors want to maintain this one-sided environment in hiring. I was drawn to academia by the diversity of viewpoints and intellectual challenges on campuses. School publications and conferences today often run from the left to the far left. We have discussed a long line of incidents on this blog of conservative faculties being targeted by cancel campaigns with tepid support from their colleagues or administrations. We have become the face of intellectual orthodoxy and it is reflected in these numbers.
Not surprising considering that most of academia is composed of parasitic, useless human beings collecting fat paychecks that they could never dream of in the private sector while saddling students with back breaking debt in exchange for information that they could collect on the internet for free.
All the other Ivys are the same if not worse. There is virtually no real diversity at any of them.
If we want to evaluate the political atmosphere in American colleges, consider two facts:
1) Steven Pinker, a notable Harvard scholar, who might be described a classical liberal, was the subject of a censorhsip campaign by the Linguistic Society of America for non-PC statements made in tweets:
“In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a “pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them,” citing as examples six of Pinker’s tweets.[93] Pinker said in reply that through this letter he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by “a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas.” Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker#cite_note-atlantic-91Conor Frie
2) Asian-American students have been excluded from Ivy League schools because of their race.
https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discrimination-on-admissions/
Now “white Asians” know why they are denied entry to Harvard.
Irony. Americas epitome of enlightenment is anything but. I am quite confident in saying that we are beyond the tipping point.
It’s not just colleges and universities.. the woke fascism has taken over corporate america. Walking on eggshells at work is very common place unless you are ” progressive” — then you can say anything you want.
I would then say that Harvard has self-identified as a haven for indoctrination of wokeness and has lost its credibility as an institution of learning. Nothing more to add other than a caution about hiring anyone from that business enterprise.
The problem is with the GOP. There is something terribly wrong with that party. The DEMs have no problem using federal tax dollars to fund their interest groups. From Acorn to all the successor activist groups, to all the NGOs given federal grants to advance DEM policies, to federal grants, tax policy, AND an insane student loan machine to fund the indoctrination factories that our current higher education institutions have become, they are all funded with our tax dollars, because DEM politicians take care of their own. The GOP, on the other hand, cannot even defund PBS. The GOP bartered all this away for what in return, nothing but lower corporate tax rates, corporate welfare, and run away military spending… to benefit a bunch of woke corporate patrons more worried about their ESG scores. A functional opposition party would zero out funding to any organization inside government (such as the FBI) or outside of government (such as Harvard) that has became ideologically captured by the other party. The GOP acquiescing to the funding of Harvard, whether through grants, student loans, or even through tax policy, is akin to the DEMs acquiescing to a budget that funds True The Vote. As can be seen from the new debt ceiling deal, we have two parties, one that funds it’s own activists with tax dollars, and one that fights its own constituents to keep funding the other party’s activists. It is inexplicable.
tommylotto,
You are pointing out the problem with collectivism vs individualism. Collectivism will always win out because it can patiently wait over time to make people more dependent. Once dependency has set in, there is no way for individualism to win with a message of independent responsibility. I have written before that socialism is a cog that can’t be reversed. That clicking sound you are hearing is the escapement slapping on the cogs teeth as it rotates towards our demise.
If you don’t think that “mob mentality” isn’t real and dangerous just think that the mob was convinced to throw feces on Cicero, one of ancient Rome’s greatest figures.
It was over 50 years ago that William F. Buckley said that he would rather be governed by the first 100 (I forget the exact number he used) names in the phone book than the faculty of Harvard. This is not a new phenomenon, but what has passed for being a liberal has now morphed into insanity.
Esquire 1961: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory,than by the Harvard University faculty.”
The term “intellectual orthodoxy” is simply a euphemism for groupthink. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, prisoner of the Nazis in WW2, wrote an interesting article “On Stupidity,” basically equating stupidity, not to a lack in native IQ, but to mob mentality. Which is what we have in academia (and also what we had in the Covid Republik). The irony being that the institutes of higher learning have become the intellectual equivalent of airport brawls that we see posted on social media.
This is what will destroy our country. Unless this changes, there will be generations of lawyers, then judges that will not protect our bill of rights and then it is over folks regardless of how much yelling and screaming we do.
James – some timely proof of what you say:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/court-denies-massachusetts-7th-grader-free-speech-request-following-legal-battle-two-genders-shirt
Yes, this is what really terrifies me about the future. Ask any youth about the importance of the first two amendments. They are the cornerstones of our foundation and they are not being ingrained in our youth’s minds at a grand scale. I think if you look at the current SCOTUS makeup, you are looking at the last gasp of judicial protection.
Harvard’s liberalism or leftism is hardly a surprise or a news flash. I can remember much further back than the Professor and Harvard of today and my memory, has simply shifted from liberalism to leftism. I can remember at no time during my life when Harvard was considered a bastion of conservative thought. Maybe pre revolutionary war since our revolution was basically a conservative revolt and not the abomination that the French Revolution became.
I will admit, at least superficially, that it has not fallen so far left as some other Northeastern and California institutions. Of course the Relative Value Unit and later the Affordable Care Act came from the Harvard School of Public Health and both failed to come anywhere close to controlling cost. Both passed through the hands of congress which made things that were suspect in concept insane in practice. The only thing the Affordable Care act accomplished was an expansion of medicaid. They totally failed to even look at the most sane, functional, cost effective, high quality and total coverage health system in the world. Germany.
However We must assume the Professor is hitting close to the mark today since ATS has rung in his bell earlier and is even more insane, illiterate, and objectionable than usual.
100% identify Fascist…who would destroy anyone that would oppose their point of view! Time to END all federal aid and loans to colleges…cities and states. Let Democrats pay for their failures.
Sadly, Jonathan, the academia that drew you into the profession is long gone in today’s Amerika. The communist drumbeat to censor everyone with whom they disagree gets louder and louder at our colleges and universities.
It did not happen over night. Academia was infested with communists, socialists and their “fellow travellers” before and during the New Deal era. We know from the Venona transcripts that many of the Ivy educated people who FDR and Truman put in high positions of authority were also Soviet spies. Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss, nearly all of the people in the Silvermaster spy ring were on the government payroll, among others.
Then when the New Left emerged in the ’60s and ’70s, many of the SDS, Weather Underground, and Black Panther terrorists got hired by prestigious academic institutions for the purpose of subverting them.
I don’t think Turley is being dishonest. I suspect he sincerely believes there was robust differences when he became an academic.
But that is an opinion based on personal impressions and perceptions.
Now he has hard data.
It is not surprising that most scientists believe in science, while far fewer believe in what QAnon says, which explains the science departments at Harvard. The ratio of these two groups in Congress is nearly 50-50.
When you know you are right, other opinions are useless. Lenin did not need or want diversity of thought, nor did Stalin. And once they gained enough power, there were no other opinions. See where we are headed?
I frankly do not understand why professors want to maintain this one-sided environment in hiring.
Every time you use “liberal” above, it should be “leftist.” That’s the difference. You as a liberal want a diversity of thought and opinion, and freedom of expression.
Leftists don’t want that. They are not participating in an intellectual project. As cultural marxists they are participating in a long march through our institutions to re-create them in their image. That includes academia. In fact it starts with academia. Everything else is downstream.
I wonder if Mr. Turley understands the difference between coloration and causation.
“I wonder if Mr. Turley understands the difference between coloration and causation.”
I wonder if you understand the difference between coloration and correlation.
They are abandoning all semblance of impartiality. This is good. Now we know the exact value of a Harvard degree. To some it’s golden, to other’s it’s a sign that says: We Are Your Enemy.