Shots In The Dark

Three political scientists have surveyed 1, 800 university professors and concluded that—yes—academics really are more liberal than the general population.

According to the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz, "College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative."

There are some hints that this study should be taken with a grain of salt: the data is six years old, the study was funded by a conservative group called the Randolph Foundation, and the political characterizations are self-descriptions by the academics surveyed.

I'm sure that this report will have conservatives such as David Horowitz, author of the Academic Bill of Rights, hollering that campuses need affirmative action for conservative professors.

But should anyone really be surprised by these numbers? To the extent that being liberal in today's United States means being open-minded, non-moralistic, and non-judgmental, then of course you're going to find that academics tend to be liberal.

The real problem for conservatives is the deep strain of anti-intellectualism inherent in much of modern conservativism. (See, for example, the conservative fight against the teaching of evolution.) How, for example, could you go into science when you don't believe in the scientific method? How could you become, say, an anthropologist when you're more interested in judging other people's behavior than understanding it?

It's also possible that this story misses the larger point: that while university faculties may be liberal, universities themselves are not—and at universities across the country, faculties have a smaller and smaller role in governance and decision-making. The number-crunchers rule. And guess what? They're conservative.