Conservative Worries “Overwrought”… or not?
November 18, 2008
A few days ago, the following article from the New York Times was forwarded on to me: “Professors’ Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not.” In case you didn’t get through the article, the general idea is that the longstanding accusation from the Right that liberal professors indoctrinate students with liberal ideology is, well, bunk. The author, Patricia Cohen, writes that, “three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.” One of the three works cited appears in the current issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association. The study (PS: Political Science & Politics (2008), 41 : 773-783 Cambridge University Press), authored by Mack Mariani of Xavier University and Gordon Hewitt of Hamilton College, examined several surveys conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). These surveys were administered to incoming freshmen and graduating seniors at a number of U.S. colleges and universities, and included a question asking students to classify their political views as either “Far Left,” “Liberal,” “Middle of the Road,” “Conservative,” or “Far Right.” The researchers based their methodology on a simple (and entirely reasonable) assumption: “If students’ political views are being changed by a left-leaning professoriate, we should be able to see evidence of that influence.” Their study tested to see whether students’ political self-classification (on the scale listed above) changed from the freshman survey to the senior survey. The data suggest that such changes are negligible and are consistent with those of non-students in the same age range. Mariani and Hewitt thus conclude that “there is no evidence that faculty ideology at an institutional level has an impact on student political ideology.”
These results are, however, considerably less conclusive than they may first appear. Mariani and Hewitt completely pass over the question of whether the far left-liberal-moderate-conservative-far right question accurately assesses political views. Had they considered this issue, they would have noticed some interesting trends. In addition to posing the political-spectrum question noted above, the HERI survey also asks respondents to provide their views on a number of political issues such as taxation, abortion, and capital punishment. Although students’ self-classification did not change significantly while in college, their responses to the political questions moved noticeably “to the left.” Below is a chart showing the percent changes in responses to the political questions. [Note: the data below are from a report on the class of 2005, while the data utilized by Mariani and Hewitt were on the class of 2003, as the issue-specific data was not made publically available for 2003. The data sets are otherwise roughly equivalent, however.]
-“Marijuana should be legalized”
Freshman %: 31.5 Agree; Senior %: 44.0 Agree; Change: +12.5
-“Abortion should be legal”
Freshman %: 49.3% Agree; Senior %: 59.8% Agree; Change: +10.5
-“Wealthy people should pay more in taxes than they do now”
Freshman %: 50.7 Agree; Senior %: 60.1 Agree; Change: +9.4
-“Same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status”
Freshman %: 60.0 Agree; Senior %: 66.7 Agree; Change: +6.7
- “The Death Penalty should be abolished”
Freshman %: 39.1% Agree; Senior %: 45.1% Agree; Change: +6.0
-“There is too much concern in the courts for the rights of criminals”
Freshman %: 61.4 Agree; Senior %: 50.0 Agree; Change: -11.4
These data indicate significant changes in political views, even though it occurred within a population that exhibited very little change in political self-identification. This suggests that what freshmen understand by the terms “liberal,” “conservative,” etc is very different from what seniors take those terms to mean. A graduating college senior may classify as moderate many policies that a freshman would identify as distinctly liberal. Such a trend may actually be the most significant effect of liberal faculty members of their pupils. By markedly shifting the realm of discourse to the left, ‘conservative’ positions become more extreme (in a society where extremism is generally viewed negatively), while ‘liberal’ positions become more moderate (in a society where moderation is identified as a great virtue). The 2008 Presidential election provides a timely example of this phenomenon: John McCain, a Republican moderate enough to have been considered as the Democratic VP nominee four years ago, was painted as a dangerous reactionary; while Barack Obama, a true Liberal’s Liberal, found impressive support amongst those voters who identified as moderate or independent.
None of this is suggest either that professors are wholly responsible for this shift in ideology, nor to suggest that whatever role professors do play is the result of a nefarious plot to indoctrinate. I merely wish to propose that we are a bit premature in tolling the bell for contagious liberalism in the Academy.
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I would add that these surveys also ignore that the entire K-16 teaching class and curriculum skews Left. Why should the norm be entering Freshmen? Students are already marinated in “liberal” thinking and values from kindergarten on.
Maybe this is the reason they are trying to start indoctrination in the lower grades like Bill Ayers and his friends have been doing in Chicago. I think that Patricia Cohen might have been a student of Professor Ayers and has learned the message of propaganda dissemination well. After what the New York Times and other liberal/progressive/neocom newspapers have done in this last election cycle, why would you believe anything they spout as ‘truth’. We’re living in 1984 now, we have the Department of Truth for real, I believe nothing in the “progressive press.”
I can’t believe the professors citing the self-identification numbers could be so stupid (or dishonest). The whole point of indoctrination is to affect attitudes without the recognition of the indoctrinated. Of course the student who considers himself moderate will continue to label himself as such.
This was incredibly sloppy reasoning to base a study upon. Do people get degrees for this kind of garbage?
I’m fifty-two, so my college time is long gone, but I entered a very, very, (very!) liberal private college as a moderate-to-conservative, and left as a moderate-to-conservative.
But I also realize now that I left as a moderate-to-conservative who felt a bit guilty and unclean about publicly espousing my economic beliefs. You can know, intellectually, that a free market is far more efficient, and promotes far more growth and production and innovation, than a market in which politicians provide the input, but if you immerse yourself in a society in which your peers and friends and classmates and professors all tend to the left, and who all associate the less-charity-oriented right as being driven only by selfishness instead of a recognition that we all need incentive, your own perception can creep towards that view.
So, I wonder if anyone has tested to see whether conservative students undergoing liberal academia don’t become less open about their politics, less willing to publicly push for their underlying principles, or simply more willing to cede the public discourse to people who yell that, obviously and of course, we should be feeding next year’s seed corn to the starving children!
Great points. A PhD student, I’m exposed to nothing but liberal orthodoxy that’s presented as though it represents the only clear, level-headed way of looking at the world.
Since when does favoring legalization of marijuana amount to moving “noticeably to the left”? Social conservatism isn’t conservative. It’s just a different kind of leftism.
Chris,
I see someone needs to read Kirk’s classic “Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries.”
“if you immerse yourself in a society in which your peers and friends and classmates and professors all tend to the left, and who all associate the less-charity-oriented right as being driven only by selfishness instead of a recognition that we all need incentive, your own perception can creep towards that view.”
This is where having a pair comes in.
I agree with the previous commenter. The single most harmful item of indoctrination is the insistence on a “right-left” or “conservative-liberal” spectrum as the only correct way of categorizing political views. The very possibility of a “collectivism-individualism” range of thinking is ignored and suppressed. Fundamentalist religions, whether Baptist or Muslim, and “hard-left” groupthink both endanger individual rights and enshrine the expansion of government power.
Another problem is that far-left extremists believe themselves to be mainstream moderates.
“The very possibility of a “collectivism-individualism” range of thinking is ignored and suppressed.”
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It’s always been my assumption (perhaps wrongly) that the “right-left” continuum encompasses several philosophical systems that tend towards compatible treatment.
Thus, in my mind, the “capitalist-socialist” continuum resides nicely along the same line as does the “individual-group” continuum, and as does the “small government-large government” continuum. Plotting someone’s belief system on one of these three axes should yield a position that accurately represents their positions on the other axes.
The one supposed fellow-traveler system that has always been assumed to coexist so nicely with these other “conservative” bedrocks – the prudish, puritanical concern that everyone else acknowledge and obey my own version of a gawd, or some such other “unquestionably correct” moral system – should actually produce a result antipodal to the conservative philosophy.
And yet, here we are. Coalitional realities reign, sometimes leading us to absurd places.