On "political balance" in universities

Megan McArdle is on the wrong track

It is a commonplace muddle: “Academics all seem to vote Democrat and this is a problem that needs fixing; the solution is to get more conservatives into academia”.

She writes:

The diversity statement’s demise is a reminder that though the Trumpian remedy may be excessive and destructive, it aims to cure a real problem: These statements were often political litmus tests, one of many ways academia delivered the message “no conservatives need apply.” The intellectual monoculture this promoted was prone to groupthink and a political liability for institutions that depend heavily on public support. No one should be sorry to see them go.

But conservatives who are giddy about such victories should note that this is a very limited win. After all the diversity offices are renamed and the diversity statements withdrawn, academia will remain near-monolithically left. This is a problem for conservatives on campus and an even bigger problem for society, because it takes a lot of scholarly expertise to maintain a modern industrial economy. Scholarship that excludes half the available ideas isn’t up to the job — if only because such lopsided expertise can’t command the public trust.

That problem can’t be cured, however, by forcing academia to abandon the most overt and annoying manifestations of its political skew. Nor can the right simply demand that academia hire more conservatives, because in most disciplines there aren’t enough conservative PhDs to staff ideologically balanced campuses, or even provide otherwise left-leaning campuses a vibrant conservative counterweight.

Getting to that point means rebuilding a pipeline of right-leaning academics that will have to start with graduate students and spit out full professors 20 years later. That will mean convincing potential graduate students that they won’t have to run through an ideological gantlet to get a job.

Underlying this argument is that there are young people who are liberals and young people who are conservatives, but conservatives are such a minority on campus, made to feel unwelcome, that academia ends up dominated by liberals, who are the only people who pursue this sort of career.

But what if we looked at this from an entirely different angle. Consider Chemistry as a discipline (it was Margaret Thatcher’s degree). There is nothing to prevent conservative-leaning young people from pursuing a PhD in Chem and then looking for an academic post. That they like to spend their evenings curled up on the couch with a volume of Michael Oakeshott’s essays won’t hinder their job prospects. They need to show the hiring committee external research funding, some promising early publications, and evidence of being capable in the classroom - that should do the trick.

Now consider this young conservative Chemist who lands a tenure-line job. Vice-President J.D. Vance says, unambiguously “Professors are the enemy.” The Republican party votes to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a Cabinet member. Federal research funding takes a huge hit under the direction of a man put in charge of a thing called DOGE, a man who is clearly not playing with a full deck. The President himself sees the findings of academic research on any subject you care to name as simply worthless. An opinion survey arrives in her inbox: “Do you lean Democrat or Republican?” Well, what do you think she is going to say?

The problem of the lack of Republican voters in the ranks of academia is maybe something other than left-wing bias on campus, especially if we consider most disciplines on campus do not really concern themselves with politics. Even the ones that do: Economics is a rather conservative discipline in its approach, but what is your average Econ prof to do with a party led by a President whose economic policies and ideas are absolutely bananas?

Maybe the reason most academics lean liberal is that the conservative political party in the US is, to its core, opposed to the very idea of disinterested research and what its findings might be? What if the solution to getting more conservatives in academia lies not with the academy, but with the nation’s conservative political party indicating that it thinks universities are a worthwhile thing to support?

The issue isn’t that Frostbite State U needs more Republicans as professors; it’s that Republicans need to think about how to attract the support of faculty at FSU. But there’s not much interest in that.