Perhaps they protesteth a bit too much

A recent report by the American Federation of Teachers called The "Faculty Bias" Studies - Science or Propaganda (I did not put a link to it because I am not sure it is worth the read) attempts to throw down the myth of a liberal faculty in academe. The opening of the report states -"Several research publications have presented evidence purporting to show that higher education in the United States displays a systematic liberal bent. This, in the opinion of critics, marginalizes conservative voices on the faculty and results in political views being presented in the classroom and shaping a research agenca that is shaped by liberal priorities. These critics also suggest that students with conservative views are at a minimum uncomfortable in this environment and at worst may be punished with lower grades."

The report then judges eight studies against five supposedly standard criteria to judge their worth. A quick read of the report this morning left me with two questions. First, who is the audience? The political attitudes of parts of segments of the faculty are well demonstrated in the research literature. Some of that research has come from decidedly conservative quarters but a good deal of it has come from polling data as a part of either national polls or from specific polls commissioned to discover the political attitudes of faculty. There is according to that polling a higher propensity of faculty to vote for liberal candidates, especially in the social sciences. With that data, who is the report trying to convince, the outside world or to reinforce the faculty that they are not biased?

Second, if those propensities are well known, can it be demonstrated that faculty in recent years have shown a bent toward all of the perils described in the introduction? There the evidence is a bit more inferential. But the evidence is there nonetheless. How many decidedly liberal speakers have been prevented from speaking at graduations or in major university convocations in the last decade? There are tons of examples where one or another faculty threw a temper tantrum against a distinguished conservative speaker. That rejection is clearly not a comment on the speaking style of the person - rather is is a rant against their message. Do the speech codes on campus, purportedly designed to enhance speech, inhibit of encourage free dialogue? The codes grew up in the late 1980s and 1990s. Many are downright disrespectful of what most people would consider the rights of discourse. Why did those codes develop? What is not clear is whether all of this "bias" has any long term effects. Certainly conservative commentators have argued that it does. I am not so sure. But I am genuinely not sure. There is some evidence that conservative students on campus simply conceal their opinions until they get their degree. But evidence from national student surveys also suggest that college makes changes in students that move them to be more supportive of governmental interventions in our lives.

When I was in my first undergraduate year in 1964 I was also a county youth chairman for Barry Goldwater. I had a Western Civilization professor who stopped his lectures about three weeks before the election to take up his time with an absurd paper arguing that Goldwaterism was a cousin of fascism. That was absurd on its face - the National Socialists in all countries where they operated wanted more government involvement not less. After about half an hour of this nonsense I ventured a question. We engaged in a debate which lasted over the next several class sessions. My performance may or may not have resulted in a lower grade at the semester. But the energy with which this professor wanted to inject current politics into his class left an impression that continues today. Admittedly, that is not a scientific study. But in the forty plus years since then, I have been in a lot of other classrooms and in a lot of discussions with faculty on a lot of campuses and found the same ideological commitment to the left.

There is an old adage among lawyers that when you have them argue the facts, when you don't argue the law. Evidently among social science researchers the adage would read something like when you have the facts argue them, when you do not argue methodology.