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 offer 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 stuck 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.”
What legislatures in red states should be doing is (1) restructuring their public higher education systems and (2) promoting alternatives to higher education.
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One restructuring which could apply to institutions public and private is to prescribe boards of trustees of manageable size and require that (with some exceptions) they be elected via a postal ballot of alumni registered to vote in the state in which the institution is located.
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Another would be to require that the renewal of a faculty member’s contract require the assent in a formal meeting of the majority of the serving trustees. that dismissal of a faculty member ‘ere his contract is up require the same, and that faculty members let go be due a severance settlement equal to the discounted present value of n years of salary and benefits, where n = 0.3 x Y, ‘Y’ being the number of years (pro-rata) a faculty member has been employed at the school. The faculty member’s compensation to be used as the basis for severance would be the mean of the previous six years (or fewer if he has been employed there fewer years) multiplied by a fudge factor. (Some faculty would be on non-renewable contracts of up to 6 semesters in length, some on renewable contracts under seven semesters in length, some on 7-12 semester contracts).
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A Republican Congress could pass federal legislation to address permissible inter-state contracts in the provision of educational services. A school like Cornell recruits most of its matriculants from out of state. One thing such regulatory legislation could do would be to replace the baccalaureate degree with shorter programs which are more focused. Another thing such regulatory legislation could do would be to debar any promise of continuous tenure to faculty recruited from out of state. Another would be to require institutions to publish statements on the demographic segments of the institutions faculty, staff, and students, with civil and criminal penalties for lying applicable to the institutions and to individual employees. One thing they would be compelled to publish would be the median SAT and achievement test scores of each demographic segment of a given year’s matriculants and the GRE / MCAT / LSAT / GMAT scores of each demographic segment of the faculty.
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Another thing federal legislation could do would be to debar mandatory ancillary charges by institutions, whether these charges be formally or constructively mandatory. The closest to a permissible mandate would be your bills at the bookstore and campus parking fines. Appended to this would be a required disclosure of an itemized list of students’ mean annual expenditure on ancillary charges. Institutions would post each year one set of room-and-board charges (one for individual students, married couples, and families) and one set of tuition charges (varying per the instructional unit). They would be compelled to publish as well the mean discount granted and the financing sources of the discounts.
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And, of course, there is financing of institutions and students.
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Higher education, like other parties, might be the beneficiary of disaster relief. Governments at all levels might offer term fellowships for faculty members to come work at particular agencies, fellowships which would include an indemnity to the institution for loss of the faculty member’s services.
Institutions or limited partnerships / corporations of faculty might place sealed bids on government contracts.
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Governments at all levels might issue vouchers to finance staff development courses for their employees. They might issue vouchers to prospective employees in discrete occupations (e.g. ROTC).
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The federal government might issue vouchers as veteran’s benefits.
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The federal government might also broker interstate compacts to arrange for a given state to act as a provider of higher education services to the residents of another state or territory.
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Institutions operating a medical center would receive Medicare and Medicaid re-imbursements, as well as re-imbursements under the employer-paid plans held by public employees.
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The foregoing should exhaust the flow of funds from public agencies to private institutions and from public agencies to students in order for them to attend private institutions. It should also exhaust the flow of funds from the federal government and from local governments to public institutions.
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State governments might issue tuition vouchers and room-and-board vouchers which students can present to in-state public institutions. The presentation of the voucher would exhaust the student’s obligation to the institution. Any student admitted to a public institution would have a contingent claim on such a voucher which they could exercise by paying a recipient’s fee each semester. The fee would be a function of the residency credit the student had accumulated throughout his life an of the number of vouchers of each type acquired to date. At this time you might get five discounted vouchers to pursue a certificate or associate’s degree, eight discounted vouchers to pursue a baccalaureate degree, four to pursue a master’s degree, eight to pursue a first professional degree, 12 to pursue a research degree. Do it differently if the degree architecture is amended. When you’ve run out your quota, you have to pay full freight for a voucher. The school takes the vouchers and submits them to dedicated state funds in return for cash. The funds are not financed by regular appropriations, but by a special income tax which fills these funds and nothing else.
Several factors explain why academics tend to cluster around seemingly contradictory positions and exhibit strong political conformity—to the point where conservative peers are virtually absent.
First, academia enforces institutional and intellectual conformity. In most academic disciplines, a single dominant theory prevails, and scholars are expected to operate within its boundaries. While the public often views academics as bold pioneers of truth, challenging the prevailing orthodoxy is professionally dangerous and can easily cost a scholar tenure. This pressure to conform extends beyond research into lifestyle, dress, teaching styles, grading standards, and, ultimately, political ideology.
Second, left-leaning ideology functions as a cohesive, structured worldview. Left-leaning political theories offer a comprehensive and predictable model for how society should function, serving as what chaos theory calls a “strong attractor” for academic minds. In contrast, free-market capitalist frameworks appear messy, decentralized, and difficult to model systematically. Many scholars struggle to embrace the concept that economic growth can “raise all boats,” even though history repeatedly demonstrates it – because they remain fixated on a zero-sum view of society.
Irony? No. It’s fascism. Expecting anything honest or ethical from this type of self-appraisal from an institution is absurd on its face in academia. The inmates took over the asylum ling ago, this is simply how bad things had to get for anyone to notice or care.
What is happening in France or Britain would be us right now had the brakes not been applied in 2024; no such restraint has been instituted at all in academia.
The only thing that will change a University with Cornell’s problem will have to be a catastrophe. In other words the students quit coming and no revenue comes in. Pain such as lost revenue does focus the mind. This happens in the business world also. When the parents of the students at Cornell realize that they are buying a worthless product, then some adverse decisions will be made. The Business World can help correct this by downgrading the graduates of these Universities, if the students fail to perform once they leave the hallowed halls and get into the real world.
I dealt with many medical school graduates from the Ivy League as far back as the 1970’s onward and many had deficient educations, especially in actual patient care. It was a stark contrast to many graduates from lessor known medical schools where they still taught the basic fundamentals of medical practice and education. It has not improved. Since.
GEB
Your desired doom scenario is a joke.
You fail to consider that liberals and conservatives do want to attend Cornell. Enrollment is up every year since 2002.
https://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/student-enrollment
Cornell needs to hire Bernie Sanders wife to head up the school. She is great at bankrupting colleges and forcing their closure! It could then rise from the ashes.
Got facts?