Cornell University has long been an example of an academic echo chamber where conservative and libertarian faculty have been largely purged from departmental ranks. For example, a study by The College Fix found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 98 to 1 among Cornell professors across six of the humanities departments. Cornell professors disrupt events, launch campaigns to fire the remaining conservative faculty, and foster a cancel campaign culture on campus. However, the faculty recently decided to review its own record and found . . . wait for it . . . that there really are no concrete measures needed to address their own overwhelming ideological bias.
According to a 238-page faculty report from the Committee on the Future of the American University, there was no consensus on ideological bias or how to handle it. Moreover, some faculty members insist that, while there is an ideological imbalance, it is not a problem because liberal faculty can explain or incorporate conservative values when needed.
The report boldly states that “[t]his report asks how the university must adapt to honor its quietly revolutionary purpose in American life. The answer cannot leave the university exactly as it is today.” However, one thing apparently does not have to change: the faculty’s ideological orthodoxy.
The report has that certain feel of an academic confab product, including a self-congratulatory observation that “disagreements did not curdle into outrage.”
The report acknowledges the ideological diversity problem but leaves it maddeningly undeveloped and ultimately unaddressed:
“The committee takes these concerns seriously without endorsing every version of them. A university that cannot model genuine pluralism of thought, that cannot hold and argue across deep disagreements without dissolving into either enforced consensus or performative conflict, is not promoting learning.”
For example, the Committee considered the fact that “[v]iewpoint diversity within the professoriate is one of the most frequently invoked concerns.” It noted that only “a single stakeholder suggested that graduate programs are the university’s most durable leverage point for producing a more intellectually and ideologically diverse new generation of faculty.”
However, it then notes: “[t]hat claim received no sustained engagement in our graduate-education conversations, even as the underlying concern about homogeneity, self-censorship, and viewpoint diversity generated some of the most extensive commentary anywhere in the committee’s process.”
Some struck out at conservatives complaining about the lack of diversity while others insisted that the priority for faculty should be to increase Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring for criteria like race and sexual orientation.
Architecture professor and Dean Milton Curry and chemistry Professor Abraham Stroock, however, explained that ideological diversity is merely a Trojan horse to attack higher education:
“Viewpoint diversity (associated with conservatives’ assertion that universities suffer from the bias of a majority of left-leaning faculty and are incapable of teaching countervailing views), far from being inclusive, is the fulcrum from which a constellation of organized vicious attacks on higher education have emerged.”
Others complained that DEI was not given sufficient attention. Durba Ghosh, a professor of history in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, complained: “[w]e bypassed a definition of diversity in the service of concluding the report; yet our evasion renders the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion vulnerable to complete erasure.”
She added a warning that “[a]s a historian, I am reminded that the groups that are calling for viewpoint diversity these days are descended from the groups that opposed diversity, equity, and inclusion over a half century ago.”
It is an ironic argument since liberal faculty have picked up the very cudgel once used by intolerant faculty to bar voices on the left or faculty based on race or gender. I have written about the rise of a new McCarthyism in our politics that is also evident in higher education. That includes the forty percent of faculty who admit that they will vote against any Trump supporters regardless of their academic credentials, writings, or accomplishments.
Other academics have called for professors to “recant” views on subjects like birthright citizenship or face isolation and other repercussions.
Many faculty members have rejected free speech and intellectual diversity arguments to restore greater balance in our universities. In my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss these arguments to justify the current levels of intolerance and orthodoxy in higher education.
Given that history, the Cornell study is a disappointment but hardly a surprise.
After The Indispensable Right was released, I spoke with several university presidents who agreed that ideological bias in hiring was undermining higher education. However, they were looking for some way to address the problem, given the refusal of departments (which generally control hiring) to change their hiring practices and bias. This report is an example of the type of hardened siloes that presidents must deal with in raising, let alone addressing, this obvious problem.
As I have maintained in these conversations, faculty members have not and will not change their hiring practices. They are fully aware of the virtual purging of all conservative and libertarian faculty from their ranks. Privately, they will acknowledge that inescapable fact. However, they refuse to make any meaningful changes.
As the Cornell report recognizes, this generation of academics has left higher education at its lowest level of public trust. It is destroying this profession. While there are various factors in play, it is due in part to the inability to allow for greater diversity of viewpoints. It has alienated many who might consider higher education but see no appeal in going to universities that are an echo chamber for the left.
As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities that hold the line on free speech, orthodoxy at private universities remains a barrier for many conservative and independent thinkers.
Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates. However, even those universities show the same hiring bias. The difference is that they are more sensitive to public pressure to restore balance.
Legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to treat citizens like a captive audience. They are expected to continue funding their departments, while faculty exclude conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to maintain echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining an intellectually diverse faculty in determining the level of continued support from citizens.
When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in The Indispensable Right.
The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring, but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.
For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.
That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.
The Cornell Report has many compelling sections on adjusting to the new realities of higher education. However, when it comes to ideological bias in hiring, the report is little more than another academic shrug.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
I respectfully disagree with the good professor. There is a reason why enrollment is on the decline at these universities: No one is interested in paying a lot of money for indoctrination and force fed, forced paid mandatory for graduation DEI classes. The community college I am attending, the student body is not interested in leftist wokeism. We are there to get an education, and get on with our lives and careers. More than a few of my classmates work part time or even full time jobs. They do not have time for the nonsense.
So, let these so-called Ivy league universities become complete and total echo chambers. Let them crank out indoctrinated grads who paid way too much money for inflated grades, cannot do what their diplomas say they should be able to do, like math. Let them be failures to launch who need their mommy and daddy to go with them to job interviews. Hiring managers at companies will get the point: Just because they might have a degree from a “Ivy League” university, does not mean they are educated, can do the job, or even show up on time.
Folsk, note that this guy has no education whatsoever. Not even a HS diploma. Enrollment is not in decline overall you dumbass. Any overall decline is higher ed. simply demographics. All provable with a simple IE search. You’ve never seen the inside of a university or college in your entire miserable life. You , in particular, don’t even have a high school diploma, and you just drooped out of a 2-yr school. You failed. You never studied enrollment data, or, most likely just took some lie from the NY Post, the stupid NY’ers news source, an spew it here.
https://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/student-enrollment. This is just Cornell.
What a stupid comment.
The student population is getting a paid ride. Donors are paying for the alcohol, drugs and orgies of a stellar population and they’re arrogant 😂.
They were losers all along…
Some examples of what the student affairs apparat have been promoting at Cornell have been provided. Some people employed in student affairs divisions are seriously creepy. Doesn’t bother the faculty.
Anyone want a Magna Carter?
“[T]he [Cornell] faculty recently decided to review its own record and found . . . wait for it . . . that there really are no concrete measures needed to address their own overwhelming ideological bias.” (JT)
Up next:
A study, by The Committee for Foxes guarding the hen house, concludes that there’s nothing to be done about their members’ bias against your chickens.
Cornell has no legal or moral obligation to become “conservative”.
No, but it does have an obligation to do something other than misrepresent itself. There are probably faculties withing Cornell which function passably well (and whose members have no influence over institutional policy). The institution as a whole is apologetical in character, a promoter of sectarian social ideologies.
I spent many years in academia, and while most faculty were left of center the institutions themselves were usually not. It was a good balance in that the intellectuals were free pursue whatever ideas they wanted and the adults in the room rain the institutions. Students were challenged in their belief by their professors but recognized , by example that adults in room made” trains run on time.”
I spent many years in academia, and while most faculty were left of center the institutions themselves were usually not. It was a good balance in that the intellectuals were free pursue whatever ideas they wanted and the adults in the room rain the institutions. Students were challenged in their belief by their professors but recognized , by example that adults in room made” trains run on time.”
In what century?
I get the impression you were born in 1904 and retired in 1972.
Who is surprised? Really? I have watched the transformation of colleges and universities since the mid-sixties. The true conversion to Leftism, the horrific intolerance of everything conservative and the purge culture really accelerated under the anti-war movement during Vietnam. We saw this coming yet did nothing. Now it’s too late. The cancer is inoperable.
There are none so blind —
The answer to all of this is Hillsdale College.
Why?
It’s a satisfactory alternative, but it has only 1,400 students. Grove City has about 2,000 students. Franciscan of Steubenville, 2,400. University of Dallas about 4,000.
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Public institutions should have a variety of perspectives manifest therein.
Ah the Soviet Union in microcosm at Cornell and we know where the Soviet Union ended up one day don’t we! But in the meantime there are many show trials and career executions to be had on the road to self-destruction.
My kid went there for physics. I regret it! The campus is appalling leftist with disgusting left ideology everywhere. They waste millions on safe spaces and grime left causes!
Upstate NY is a PIT as well. Send your kid south.
My kid tutored others…and was shocked by how bad many of the students were at basic writing. DEI is the major form of study there!
Now that’s a big fat lie.
Upstate New York is not a pit, but it’s history since 1969 is a reminder that mediocrity and incremental decline can be a choice.
cut off 98% of ALL Federal Aid…to college and the state which also fund the college
Time for the GOP to FIGHT BACK!
Cut off? Who, what, when, where, how? Clearly this guy doesn’t have an education.
Already specified in this thread. Reading comprehension is something you lack.
The donors , foreign donors are paying for your ruin.
Send your children to Bob’s School of Plumbing or Kate’s Culinary School, they’ll be happier, wealthier and certainly more mentally prepared to enter the real world.
The ‘Allegory of The Cave’ becomes the Allegory of the Mushroom…the fungus that shall never leave the cave…and will rot prematurely.
Much is written about Ivy League professors and administrators, on the question of whether they are revolutionaries, whether they indoctrinate, whether they are biased against Asians, whether they hate Jews, and whether they are political (such as Penn hiring Joe Biden as a professor, Penn building the Penn-Biden center with money from China, and Penn’s president becoming Ambassador to Germany). I’d like to offer a simple answer to this question. An irrefutable answer. An answer based merely on math. … More than half of America is White, but less than half of the student body of every Ivy League university is White. Q.E.D.
So what.
Anonymous,
You say “So what.” I would agree with you, except for this fact.
Taxpayers are being forced to support universities that engage in anti-White anti-Asian anti-Jewish racism, and attacks on our Bill Of Rights and our 80 million “deplorables”.
Again, so what? You’ll deny Americans a right to study what they want because you don’t like it?
BTW, taxpayers are not forced, its congress that does the allocations. And its money well spent. Question: Forced? Prove that.
Besides being an overt racist you are a particularly ****** person too.
Anonymous,
You say you want me to prove that MAGA taxpayers are forced to pay taxes that get spent on Ivy League universities. Okay. Here’s my proof. Stop paying your taxes, and see what happens.
Actually, almost no one wishes to study this. The victimology programs account for < 0.2% of all baccalaureate degrees awarded. They’re stupefyingly cross-subsidized by other departments. What occurs is that to staff them with corresponding faculty, the hiring in the ordinary arts and sciences departments is polluting by social ideologues who have no business in an academic institution and often the departments themselves are over run with race-class-gender obsessives. There are whole subdepartments of American history that are no longer taught anymore for these reasons.
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Your also forgetting the mandatory summer reading (my employer once prescribed a book by Barbara Eherenreich) and the distribution requirements which jam people into obnoxious courses.
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In addition to that, there is what has happened to teacher training programs, which are gatekeepers for the schoolteacher population.
So you’re saying that since whites are predominate the USA they must therefore also have predominate status over non-whites at Il schools? Racism rears its ugly head in the form of S. Benish.
FYI: https://blog.collegevine.com/the-demographics-of-the-ivy-league
Anonymous,
Let’s set aside the fact that there are not “11 schools” in the Ivy League.
Let’s focus on “predominate”. The teenager that make up the study body do not predominate. The administrators and professors predominate. They decide whether to educate or indoctrinate the not-yet-fully-formed minds and beliefs of the student body. I don’t have any criticism of the non-White students who accept the invitations of the administrators and professors. The teenage students know not what they do. My criticism is with the ideological indoctrinators.
I remember when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream about ignoring skin color was our nation’s dream. That was very long ago.
It was a rhetorical exercise. Other than Bayard Rustin, you’d be hard put to find anyone in King’s camarilla who objected to the regime of racial preferences which emerged after 1968. See Ed Koch’s account of his conversations with Joseph Rauh in 1971. A race patronage regime was Rauh’s goal at that time and it likely had been much earlier.
I can tell that your education must be from one of those substandard institutions. Predominant is the adjective; predominate is the VERB.
Anonymous,
I’d appreciate your scholarship help. Why was it correct for you to use “predominate” as a noun and then as an adjective in the same sentence?
[It’s not important, but since you’re interested … I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.]
My grammar is correct; I should have added PUNCTUATION.
“predominant” is the adjective; “predominate” is the VERB.
ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
“Predominate is a verb meaning to prevail, to have greater importance or quantity…
Queens and Staten Island, where single-family homes predominate, actually saw their first upticks in years
They gave an insight into the ethos that predominates at top English clubs.
“Predominant, however, is an adjective describing something or someone with the greatest importance, influence, or power. It can also be used to describe something that is most common.
Try to just look it up next time, although you should not have needed to.
Well, Cinderella…
It just may be that whites are stupider than non-whites and therefore can’t make it into the Ivies. Or they are poorer and can’t pay for that type of education.
Anonymous,
When you say “It just must be” that Whites are “stupider” or “poorer”, you make my point. You make it clear that “It just can’t be racism or ideological bias”. No decent person would stand for that!
That’s actually demonstrably untrue and has been understood as such for generations. The reason schools wish to be free of SATs and achievement tests and the reason the college board gutted them in 1995 was because the results on the tests gave admissions directors answers they did not want.
X,
Objective evidence is easy to find. Here’s another example.
Not too long ago, Princeton terminated its long-standing requirement that students who major in the Classics have to be reasonably proficient in Greek or Latin. Princeton’s explanation was that the requirement was too difficult for its current student body.
They’re highly other-directed Bourbons who despise the rest of society.
I suffered from comment interruptus. At any rate, Ithaka, Cornell’s hometown, also became the hometown of many aging hippies from years gone by. An article aptly described the town which includes Cornell’s campus, as ten square miles surrounded by reality.
Cornell’s home town, Ithaka,
In the ‘60s, of the three chaplains at Cornell, Daniel Berrigan was the least radical leftist of them One Sunday, my roommate’s faculty advisor walked out of mass along with his wife and children. He as a Professor of Materials Scuence and Engineering. I followed. I doubt that that would happen today at our once great Alma Mater.
Most institutions should not have chaplains. If local churches wish to send someone to hold services at the campus chapel or run a shuttle service to local churches, the administration should not stand in the way.
North Korea: “We demand total ideological conformity in our Parliament, and any dissent will be punished severely.”
American colleges and universities: “Hold my beer!”
North Korea is a foreign country. It can do whatever it wants. It’s none of your business.
Yes it is my business.
Typo correction: “Ezra Cornell.”
“I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” The founding statement by Eza Cornell needs an update: “…, as long as that area of study excludes libertarian or conservative instructors.
Liberals are so far left hey can no longer recognize leftist bias. Today they think the center is far right, and JKF was a fascist. How can they address what they can’t acknowledge?
Um… so far left… and yo know that how? BTW, JFK was a fascist. Review his foreign policies during his term. One in particular, the Cuban missile crisis, almost destroyed the US and Cuba in 1962 in a silly dispute. Bay of Pigs. Central and South American secret interventions. https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/jfk-foreignpolicy
No he wasn’t a fascist, no the dispute was not silly, and no were were not almost destroyed.