Shades of Mediocrity

News flash: academics are liberals

In the coming-as-a-shock-to-no-one category: a new study finds that college faculties are overwhelmingly populated by self-described liberals. Even engineering and business departments, generally regarded as more conservative than other disciplines, were found to have many more faculty describing themselves as liberal than as conservative. The study was done by respected academics, but funded by the right-wing Randolph Foundation.

Conservative commentators have already begun indignantly presuming that this imbalance exists because liberal senior faculty and administrators discriminate in hiring against those who hold different political views. While I would never assert that this doesn't happen (and I have heard tales of this kind of bias going the other direction), I have a hard time believing that that could really be the primary cause of the imbalance between liberals and conservatives in academia.

What I suspect is that academia is rife with liberals for similar reasons that the fields of K-12 teaching and librarianship are: people who choose those fields are frequently willing to sacrifice earning power and worldly prestige in exchange for working in a field that seems (at least initially) not to require a total values compromise. Not that academics who really make it don't earn well and have a decent amount of social capital: they do, but compared to what's possible in the private sector, the possibilities in academia are relatively limited. The typical liberal dedication to education, tolerance, and free speech means that liberals feel right at home in college and university environments, where, at the very least, a whole lot of lip service is paid to such values and their exercise.

It's still a chicken-and-egg problem in a way, though. Would more conservatives choose academic careers if the environment was friendlier to their beliefs? Or does (over)education really turn people into liberals? I don't know the answer, but the accusation of discrimination is simplistic, weak, and fails to consider a huge number of more likely explanations.