I've agreed with most of your posts about the problems of "cancel culture" on the Left, and the Left's intolerance for idea diversity. But this article leaves out a major reason why most university professors identify with the Left. (And by the way, most of the professors I know are also very critical of the Democratic Party, so there is more idea diversity on the Left than you acknowledge. Many of us are more Independents).
The Right doesn't just have a human capital problem. The Right has a science and fact problem. How could a university hire someone who doesn't believe in the basic science of climate change when 99% of scientists agree that it is caused by human activity? Or how could a university hire an economist or sociologist who doesn't understand that most migrants are hard-working, tax-paying contributors to the US economy? And here at Notre Dame, even Catholic professors understand that outlawing abortion is going to lead to more deaths and that the policy issues around women's healthcare are far more complicated than Republican policies allow.
The Right has abandoned science and fact, and this is why they are not represented in universities. As they say, the Truth has a Leftist Bias. Your point about pluralism rather than DEI is good -but in fact, this is already what many of us have done... we've substituted "pluralistic public problem-solving" for "democracy" and DEI because this administration has outlawed our language. Because your audience here is largely Left, it is natural for you to be harder on the Left and more lenient on the Right. But in this post, you've missed the opportunity to understand that universities don't want pluralism of ideas on whether science and facts exist.
We have to be careful not to pose democracy and fascist autocracy as "two equally valid ideas." Polarization is a problem, and we should address it. But fascism is also a problem, and as your post last week suggested, many of us in universities have been studying fascism for decades. We know that social movements - people power - are essential. So this week, when my university signed a letter with many other universities opposing Trump's plans for higher education, I hope you'll see this isn't a betrayal of our commitment to genuine pluralism. Sometimes I worry polarization and pluralism are overused words, that distract us from seeing the actual dynamics of what is happening.
Hi Lisa. Thanks for this. I knew this was going to be a tough one, pleasing no one -- I've had some negative feedback from the right on this post too, and have had a couple other people suggest your explanation as well -- "folks on the right don't believe in facts, so they can't be academics."
I do take your meaning here. I do think there are some factual delusions on the right, for example I've written before about how the Red media ecosystem is lower quality in general (e.g. https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/meta-drops-fact-checking-because). But I don't think this can be the primary explanation for the disparity in student and faculty politics, for several reasons.
Second, are conservatives really that far behind in every single field? Why would we see fewer conservative professors teaching literature, for example? I don't believe anyone is arguing that conservatives are routinely misinterpreting Shakespeare, yet it's in the humanities where the disparity is greatest (see e.g. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.2202/1540-8884.1067/html)
Third, factual distortions are not uniquely a right problem. At this point we have good documentation that left ideologies distorted published science, particularly in the social sciences and psychology. We recently covered one recent study on how self-censorship is distorting results (https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/i/155020109/self-censorship-in-psychology)
I completely agree that democracy and fascism are not two equally valid ideas. But I don't think the only alternative to fascism is leftist hegemony in the academy.
Also, if "pluralism" is to succeed, it has to be something different than a rebranding of DEI! We should absolutely care about whether minority students have proper access to education... but if we want future conservatives to be fact-based, then we also absolutely need to care about whether conservative students are enrolling.
Thanks for this response. I I think my main point is a bit different; I believe there is vast ideological pluralism in universities in the US today and historically. If we were using a European scale for what is "left" or "right," I think we could see that diversity. But even in the 1980s, the Republican party had shifted significantly. Reagan now appears to have been a Democrat in his policies. The Democratic Party adopted a lot of Republican ideas, and moved to the right. So I'm not sure it is fair or accurate to just look at party affiliation to understand ideological diversity in universities.
I am going to largely disagree with Lisa here, not necessarily on the issues, but with her broader rhetorical point. I want to point out that even saying "the right has a science and fact problem" over and over makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Polarization is structural but our choices matter. Putting it in this way means we have turned around and reinforced the idea espoused by many right-wingers that science is done by left-wing people for left-wing causes. There is obviously some truth to this argument (I think this is the point of Jonathan's graphs and charts in this post) but it does not help our cause to use the authority of science to say "we must do X and science says so where X is some clear left-wing policy option"; far from convincing them of X, it means they distrust "science."
But also, the framing of the issues here is not correct. Just saying "climate change is caused by humans" does not get us anywhere close to figuring out what to do about it. There are plenty of people who agree on this basic matter of fact (climate change is caused by humans) and disagree completely on what to do. There are plenty of articles about the fight over the transmission lines in Maine. The LA Times ran a great series about the environmentalists who believe in climate change who nevertheless are against the laying of huge solar panel farms in the desert (see https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-06-27/solar-panels-could-save-california-but-they-hurt-the-desert). I don't blame anyone here; these are hard policy questions but they are ultimately not about the "science" but rather the value trade-offs in making particular policy choices.
As the sociologist Gil Eyal has diagnosed it, the politicization of science is a logical consequence of the scientization of politics; once "science" was given the place of authority in resolving our policy disputes, of course, the science itself became contested. I wrote about this in this post, https://computingandsociety.substack.com/p/is-science-bad-for-politics, discussing the work of the policy analyst, Daniel Sarewitz.
That doesn't mean that left-wing professors have to give up their left-wing causes; but it does mean that they have to stop saying reflexively that their preferred policies just follow logically from science. That's bad for science and that's bad for universities doing science.
Thanks for your thoughts. But I definitely do not think that policy options flow directly from science. As a political scientist, there are many factors that go into policy formulation. My point had nothing to do with this.
My apologies. But I think my broader point still stands: saying "the right has a science and fact problem" over and over makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It reinforces the idea that science is done by left-wing people for left-wing causes (this is not a Democrat/Republican distinction necessarily) and ultimately reduces the standing of science. It will not help universities in their fight against the Trump administration.
I've agreed with most of your posts about the problems of "cancel culture" on the Left, and the Left's intolerance for idea diversity. But this article leaves out a major reason why most university professors identify with the Left. (And by the way, most of the professors I know are also very critical of the Democratic Party, so there is more idea diversity on the Left than you acknowledge. Many of us are more Independents).
The Right doesn't just have a human capital problem. The Right has a science and fact problem. How could a university hire someone who doesn't believe in the basic science of climate change when 99% of scientists agree that it is caused by human activity? Or how could a university hire an economist or sociologist who doesn't understand that most migrants are hard-working, tax-paying contributors to the US economy? And here at Notre Dame, even Catholic professors understand that outlawing abortion is going to lead to more deaths and that the policy issues around women's healthcare are far more complicated than Republican policies allow.
The Right has abandoned science and fact, and this is why they are not represented in universities. As they say, the Truth has a Leftist Bias. Your point about pluralism rather than DEI is good -but in fact, this is already what many of us have done... we've substituted "pluralistic public problem-solving" for "democracy" and DEI because this administration has outlawed our language. Because your audience here is largely Left, it is natural for you to be harder on the Left and more lenient on the Right. But in this post, you've missed the opportunity to understand that universities don't want pluralism of ideas on whether science and facts exist.
We have to be careful not to pose democracy and fascist autocracy as "two equally valid ideas." Polarization is a problem, and we should address it. But fascism is also a problem, and as your post last week suggested, many of us in universities have been studying fascism for decades. We know that social movements - people power - are essential. So this week, when my university signed a letter with many other universities opposing Trump's plans for higher education, I hope you'll see this isn't a betrayal of our commitment to genuine pluralism. Sometimes I worry polarization and pluralism are overused words, that distract us from seeing the actual dynamics of what is happening.
Hi Lisa. Thanks for this. I knew this was going to be a tough one, pleasing no one -- I've had some negative feedback from the right on this post too, and have had a couple other people suggest your explanation as well -- "folks on the right don't believe in facts, so they can't be academics."
I do take your meaning here. I do think there are some factual delusions on the right, for example I've written before about how the Red media ecosystem is lower quality in general (e.g. https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/meta-drops-fact-checking-because). But I don't think this can be the primary explanation for the disparity in student and faculty politics, for several reasons.
First, the trend is decades old. Climate change in particular was a far less polarized issue in the 1990s (e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/us-partisan-polarization-on-climate-change-can-stalemate-give-way-to-opportunity/2666C4C08C3A5456B3001240B882C48D) so that can't be the explanation for the disparities we see then.
Second, are conservatives really that far behind in every single field? Why would we see fewer conservative professors teaching literature, for example? I don't believe anyone is arguing that conservatives are routinely misinterpreting Shakespeare, yet it's in the humanities where the disparity is greatest (see e.g. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.2202/1540-8884.1067/html)
Third, factual distortions are not uniquely a right problem. At this point we have good documentation that left ideologies distorted published science, particularly in the social sciences and psychology. We recently covered one recent study on how self-censorship is distorting results (https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/i/155020109/self-censorship-in-psychology)
I completely agree that democracy and fascism are not two equally valid ideas. But I don't think the only alternative to fascism is leftist hegemony in the academy.
Also, if "pluralism" is to succeed, it has to be something different than a rebranding of DEI! We should absolutely care about whether minority students have proper access to education... but if we want future conservatives to be fact-based, then we also absolutely need to care about whether conservative students are enrolling.
Thanks for this response. I I think my main point is a bit different; I believe there is vast ideological pluralism in universities in the US today and historically. If we were using a European scale for what is "left" or "right," I think we could see that diversity. But even in the 1980s, the Republican party had shifted significantly. Reagan now appears to have been a Democrat in his policies. The Democratic Party adopted a lot of Republican ideas, and moved to the right. So I'm not sure it is fair or accurate to just look at party affiliation to understand ideological diversity in universities.
I am going to largely disagree with Lisa here, not necessarily on the issues, but with her broader rhetorical point. I want to point out that even saying "the right has a science and fact problem" over and over makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Polarization is structural but our choices matter. Putting it in this way means we have turned around and reinforced the idea espoused by many right-wingers that science is done by left-wing people for left-wing causes. There is obviously some truth to this argument (I think this is the point of Jonathan's graphs and charts in this post) but it does not help our cause to use the authority of science to say "we must do X and science says so where X is some clear left-wing policy option"; far from convincing them of X, it means they distrust "science."
But also, the framing of the issues here is not correct. Just saying "climate change is caused by humans" does not get us anywhere close to figuring out what to do about it. There are plenty of people who agree on this basic matter of fact (climate change is caused by humans) and disagree completely on what to do. There are plenty of articles about the fight over the transmission lines in Maine. The LA Times ran a great series about the environmentalists who believe in climate change who nevertheless are against the laying of huge solar panel farms in the desert (see https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-06-27/solar-panels-could-save-california-but-they-hurt-the-desert). I don't blame anyone here; these are hard policy questions but they are ultimately not about the "science" but rather the value trade-offs in making particular policy choices.
As the sociologist Gil Eyal has diagnosed it, the politicization of science is a logical consequence of the scientization of politics; once "science" was given the place of authority in resolving our policy disputes, of course, the science itself became contested. I wrote about this in this post, https://computingandsociety.substack.com/p/is-science-bad-for-politics, discussing the work of the policy analyst, Daniel Sarewitz.
That doesn't mean that left-wing professors have to give up their left-wing causes; but it does mean that they have to stop saying reflexively that their preferred policies just follow logically from science. That's bad for science and that's bad for universities doing science.
Thanks for your thoughts. But I definitely do not think that policy options flow directly from science. As a political scientist, there are many factors that go into policy formulation. My point had nothing to do with this.
My apologies. But I think my broader point still stands: saying "the right has a science and fact problem" over and over makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It reinforces the idea that science is done by left-wing people for left-wing causes (this is not a Democrat/Republican distinction necessarily) and ultimately reduces the standing of science. It will not help universities in their fight against the Trump administration.