After two decades as a Professor of Psychology at University of Central Florida, Charles Negy had his contract terminated (Ellwanger). Kieran Bhattacharya, was suspended from the University of Virginia School of Medicine (Coffey). After being recruited to play football for Cheshire Academy in Connecticut, 16 year old Michael Mancini was abruptly expelled (Miller). What do these three have in common? They dared to exercise their rights to free speech in expressing their conservative views and thereby were released or “cancelled”. In each of these cases, these actions were the result of autocratic liberalism at each institution. I will review the extent and the impact of this liberal takeover of educational institutions and propose a solution.
Liberalism in college faculty
Conservative viewpoints are in a statistical decline among college and university faculty. Ladd and Lipset found in 1972 that 46 percent of faculty members considered themselves either liberal or left, and 27 percent were middle of the road. Conservative professors comprised 28 percent of the total. (Ladd 16)
By 2006, in a survey of college and university faculty, the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that only 19.7 percent identified themselves as conservative, while 62.2 percent identified as liberal. This is out of proportion to the general population. (Gross 26-7). In 2018, Mitchell Langbert found that at fifty-one of the top sixty-six U.S. News-ranked colleges, the Democrat to Republican ratios among the faculty averaged 10.4:1. By excluding Annapolis and West Point that ratio became 12.7:1 (Langbert 186-7). For a comparison to previous data, this would be equivalent to 91 percent liberal, 9 percent conservative. Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, located in Middletown, Connecticut has stated that in New England, the liberal to conservative professor ratio is 28:1 (Roth). Again, for comparison, this equates to 96 percent liberal, four percent conservative. Over a period of 50 years, the percentage of liberals has almost doubled, growing from 46 to 91 percent, while the percentage of conservatives has shrunk from 28 to 9 percent.
Liberalism in College Administration
Liberals predominate college administrations. A study conducted by Samuel Abrams in 2017 of approximately 900 college administrators found that the liberal staff members outnumber the conservatives. Seventy-one percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal, while only six percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree. (Abrams).
Liberalism in public schools
Having taken over the colleges and universities, the liberals are now working on a takeover of the K-12 public school system. Three middle schoolers in the Kiel, Wisconsin school district had sexual harassment complaints filed against them for calling a classmate by a wrong pronoun (Vincent). A first-grade class at Maurice Sendak Community School, a public school in Brooklyn, N.Y., hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour for the students on Feb. 24 (Hernandez), Coach Joe Kennedy, former football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington state, was fired from his job after kneeling for prayer on the 50-yard line after games (Clarridge). (Update: the Supreme Court decided in favor of Coach Kennedy. The bottom line of the legal expenses will be in the millions).
Responding to a survey by the Education Week Research Center, 41 percent of K-12 public school teachers said they were Democrats while another 30 percent said they were independents. Only 27 percent were Republicans (Klein). Brianna Heldt, writing in Townhall.com wrote that “According to a recent article in National Review, both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) appear to be pursuing increasingly progressive political agendas.” AFT president Randi Weingarten, was quoted by Heldt as saying “We’re becoming more political, not less political.” “The NEA and the AFT both promote a curriculum that stresses transgenderism, white guilt, and other progressive ideologies” (1)
Liberalism breeds liberalism
College admissions as selected by liberal institutions favor liberal students. Over 76 percent of the Harvard College Class of 2024 responded to a survey which found that 72.4 percent of the class self-identified as either “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” Only 7.4 percent self-identified as “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative.” Harvard admitted only 27.6% conservative or moderate (Turley). This is out of proportion to the American public as a whole. Gallup polling identifies 37% of Americans as conservative, 35% as moderate and 24% as liberal. (Saad).
THE PROBLEM
Having reviewed the extent of the tentacles of liberalism within our educational institutions, in addition to the individual cases previously mentioned, the impact of this imbalance is significant. These include a lack of checks and balances, liberal intolerance, and censorship.
Checks and balances
When there is no point-counterpoint discussion, free expression of ideas becomes stagnant. We have three branches of government in this country, designed to provide checks and balances. This helps to prevent an autocrat from assuming excessive power and expunging opposition. Due to the dwindling numbers of conservatives in higher education, a system of ideological checks and balances is being supplanted by a liberal autocratic mechanism which seeks to suppress its conservative ideological counterpoint, as evidenced by several examples cited above.
When I was a student at a well-known university, it was a well-known maxim that graduates of that university were unlikely to be hired as faculty. The school did not want to become a victim of educational inbreeding. New and fresh ideas were important, and it was thought that hiring faculty from other institutions would maintain a needed fresh influx of ideas. Similarly, the exclusion of conservative thought in both faculty and students is creating a destructive educational liberal inbreeding that will serve to devalue the educational process.
Liberalism breeds intolerance
Cancel culture ostracism has somehow become socially acceptable behavior, especially in liberal circles (Faria). Expression of conservative viewpoints is often stifled, forbidden, or “cancelled” on college campuses. Emerson college officials recently suspended Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, for passing out stickers that criticized China. (Sobey) In February 2022, Gonzaga University shut down a speaking event which was arranged by the school’s College Republicans club, featuring conservative speaker Ben Shapiro. A Shapiro speaking engagement at the University of California, Berkeley resulted in protests and rioting which produced nine arrests and $100,000 worth of property damage (Houston-Hencken). After receiving threats from progressive groups, Dartmouth University canceled a College Republicans event (Hutchinson). At the University of Buffalo, a conservative student says she had to hide in a men’s bathroom after a mob of angry student protesters disrupted an event at which conservative Allen West was the featured speaker (Poff). Fear and intimidation should have no place in the halls of our educational institutions, but liberalism seems to think otherwise.
Intolerance breeds censorship.
While going to great lengths to espouse the evils of oppression, liberal intolerance can lead to the same system of oppression that they claim to despise. Troy Daugherty, a professor of American History at Illinois Central College threatened one of his students that if writing about President Trump’s view on abortion in a writing assignment it must be placed in a negative context. Otherwise the student would get an F on the assignment (Zupkus).
Nearly 68 percent of conservatives censored themselves, while around 49 percent of moderates did so. Only 24 percent of liberals reported self-censorship. A University of North Carolina survey of undergraduates found that many conservatives and liberals alike were concerned about the possible negative consequences of expressing their views (Friedersdorf). A Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles survey of 141,189 full-time, first-year students attending about 200 public and private colleges found that the majority of freshmen said that they were willing to extinguish speech they find offensive. While the survey did not differentiate between conservative or liberal viewpoints, 71 percent of respondents were willing to suppress speech that they felt was racially or sexually inappropriate or offensive (Rampell). When free expression of thoughts, ideas, and opinions are suppressed, education metamorphosizes into indoctrination.
SOLUTION
Similar to affirmative action programs of the past, definitive action needs to occur to correct the continuing progression of a liberal takeover of the educational system. I propose the following steps:
- Political orientation should be added to the list of individuals against whom discrimination is illegal. Just like color, race, gender, religion, etc., political orientation discrimination should be illegal. Cases of discrimination can then be adjudicated as a civil rights complaint in a court of law.
- Conservative students and faculty members should be actively recruited by colleges, universities, and public schools. Once enrolled, administrators must ensure that they are treated fairly in the venues of free expression on campus both in and outside of the classroom.
- Complaints against schools can be submitted to the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for investigation. If the institution is found to be guilty of illegal discrimination due to political orientation, an affirmative action program may be instituted REQUIRING the hiring of conservative (or liberal) faculty and administration and the admission of conservative (or liberal) students, or redress as deemed appropriate to the Commission.
Objections
One may ask that if circumstances were reversed and the conservatives outnumbered the liberals, would there be similar problems? Is it possible to attract quality conservative faculty and students even if they are available? Given the time-consuming process and the expense of filing legal claims in the court system, would the proposed solution produce a significant, timely and affordable redress should offenses occur?
These are legitimate objections that I have myself. This is a difficult problem that has developed over the past 50 years. It will not likely be quickly or inexpensively resolved. To address these objections, first it is less likely based on the differences between liberal brains and conservative brains that conservatives will exercise the same autocratic intolerance and censorship that currently exists with the liberal imbalance (Bob). While the real answer to that is unknown, it is clear that the best system is a balanced system. It may be difficult to attract quality conservative faculty members to enter a staff where they will be philosophically outnumbered. Likewise, conservative students may already be reluctant to matriculate at an institution wherein they will be outnumbered, and they fear their conservative values will place them in academic jeopardy. Addressing the problem will be difficult, but like eating an elephant, it can be overcome one bite at a time. Even if it takes another 50 years, a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
Conclusion
The educational system in this country currently has a significant imbalance in the political leanings of faculty and administration. The result of that imbalance is to the detriment of the system. It has resulted in intolerance, censorship, and in some cases violence. Correction is needed to prevent one of the finest educational systems in the world from crumbling under the weight of its own shortsightedness.
Epilogue
Once upon a time, our hero enrolled in an English Composition class. He hadn’t had any English composition classes since high school back when the Earth’s crust was still cooling. He expected a technical course of study dealing with sentence and paragraph structure, subject and verb tense agreement, pronouns, contractions, and assorted other aspects of proper writing techniques. Although he did receive all of this, what he did not anticipate was the large dose of instruction on racism, anti-racism, oppression, slavery, white supremacy, colonialism, climate change, and other popular liberal subjects. As a final paper for the class, he decided to explore the depth and the impact of this liberal mindset in educational institutions. He is reportedly grateful for the eye-opening educational opportunity he has received, and also for learning a bit about pronouns and sentence structure along the way. Postscript: He got an “A” in the class.
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Lost in the Fog 