Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?

by Neil Gross

Overview

Some observers see American academia as a bastion of leftist groupthink that indoctrinates students and silences conservative voices. Others see a protected enclave that naturally produces free-thinking, progressive intellectuals. Both views are self-serving, says Neil Gross, but neither is correct. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? explains how academic liberalism became a self-reproducing phenomenon, and why Americans on both the left and right should take notice.

Academia employs a higher percentage of liberals than nearly any other profession. But the usual explanations—hiring bias against conservatives, correlations of liberal ideology with high intelligence—do not hold up to scrutiny. Drawing on a range of original research, statistics, and interviews, Gross argues that “political typing” plays an overlooked role in shaping academic liberalism. For historical reasons, the professoriate developed a reputation for liberal politics early in the twentieth century. As this perception spread, it exerted a self-selecting influence on bright young liberals, while deterring equally promising conservatives. Most professors’ political views formed well before they stepped behind the lectern for the first time.

Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? shows how studying the political sympathies of professors and their critics can shed light not only on academic life but on American politics, where the modern conservative movement was built in no small part around opposition to the “liberal elite” in higher education. This divide between academic liberals and nonacademic conservatives makes accord on issues as diverse as climate change, immigration, and foreign policy more difficult.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674074514
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/09/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	399
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Neil Gross is Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction 1. The Politics of American Professors 2. Why Are They Liberal? The Standard Explanations 3. Political Self-Selection and the Academic Profession 4. Political Differences among Professors 5. The Knowledge-Politics Problem 6. The Campaign against “Liberal Bias” 7. Why Conservatives Care Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

The question is not whether college professors are liberal… The much more interesting question is why college professors are liberal, and sociologist Neil Gross has studied it for years. His results are worth considering… Gross is at his best when he’s explaining his surveys and experiments and using them to evaluate competing theories of professors’ liberalism—and fortunately, he spends a lot of time doing that. Readers will gain a nuanced understanding of the subject, and conservative readers in particular will find many interesting nuggets here.

National Review - Robert Verbruggen

Neil Gross’s work is crucial for anyone who cares about higher education and who also cares about the facts.

Louis Menand

[Gross] registers clearly the overwhelming ideological slant of higher education… [His thesis] leaves conservative critics with a disarming irony, though: The more critics expose liberal indoctrination and intolerance, the more they reinforce the image of academia that makes young conservatives shun it.

Weekly Standard - Mark Bauerlein

In this engaging book, Neil Gross uses a dizzying range of evidence to take apart many common beliefs. He shows—among many other things—that professors are less liberal than pundits claim, that today’s younger professors are less radical than older ones, and that it is not so much that academia turns people liberal as that liberals are attracted to academia. The book cements Gross’s reputation as one of the most interesting sociologists of his generation.

Mario Small

Neil Gross’s Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? enters the ongoing debate about the position and role of the academy in American life at a high-stakes moment… Until now, the characterization of a staunchly liberal professoriate has annoyed progressives and disturbed conservatives, while remaining a curiously underexamined trope in American political life. As Gross’s study shows, it is a product of long-standing misguided assumptions and overdrawn conclusions about American academics’ politics. Gross offers an impressive range of hard social scientific data to soften the hyperbole and help set straight the terms of our debate.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagenn Prospect

Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? offers a thoughtful, rigorous, and readable study of the causes and effects of liberal attitudes among college professors. Reading this book gave me an entirely new way of thinking about the interactions between political views, social attitudes, and life choices. Gross deserves a wide hearing.

Andrew Gelman

A major contribution to debates about the politics of academia. Neil Gross blends cutting-edge research with old-fashioned reason to explain the cultural and economic forces that send liberals into the professoriate. This is a smart, surprising, and important book.

Eric Klinenberg

Gross does what really good scholars do—namely, research, research, research. Through reflection on existing data and that gathered from studies of his own devising, he concludes that the liberalism of the academy is not nearly so pronounced as alarmists would like to believe, nor is it uniform.

PopMatters - James Williams

Neil Gross's Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? enters the ongoing debate about the position and role of the academy in American life at a high-stakes moment...Until now, the characterization of a staunchly liberal professoriate has annoyed progressives and disturbed conservatives, while remaining a curiously underexamined trope in American political life. As Gross's study shows, it is a product of long-standing misguided assumptions and overdrawn conclusions about American academics' politics. Gross offers an impressive range of hard social scientific data to soften the hyperbole and help set straight the terms of our debate.

American Prospect - Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Gross (Sociology/Univ. of British Columbia; Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, 2008, etc.) examines the facts behind the conservative movement's oft-heard criticism of higher education: that American universities are, as presidential candidate Rick Santorum famously said, little more than "indoctrination mills" for the political left. Relying on years of research, the author confirms that conservatives are correct in their belief that many professors align themselves on the liberal spectrum, though he notes also that academia has far fewer radical professors in its midst than generally thought. While a mere 8 percent of professors self-identify as "radical," a recent study revealed that 62 percent of students believed the term accurately described their professors--proof of the conservative movement's ability to perpetuate the myth of the radical professor. Gross readily acknowledges that some conservative scholars may feel outnumbered in a university's social science department but that the professor's marginalized status is hardly any different than "progressives at some elite law firms." More interesting than academia's demographics, however, are the causes of these demographics. In short: What is at the root of liberalism in academia? Do liberal academics share a different value system than their conservative counterparts? Does self-selection play a role? To what extent does one's politics affect one's career path? And a related question: How can professors protect their academic freedoms in an environment so closely tied to the politicians who hold the purse strings? Gross examines all of these questions and more, often overwhelming readers with facts and figures that lead to somewhat nebulous conclusions. Its academic tone--while appropriate given the subject matter--reminds readers that an academic in academia produced it. While Gross' neutrality is admirable, his work's inability to open itself up to a wider audience risks confining a valuable debate to the primary players within it. A dense sociological report on the facts and falsehoods of the political leanings of professors.

Kirkus Reviews