Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.
Conservative higher education reformers like Chris Rufo have made impressive strides lately. The toxic ideologies of DEI and “transgenderism” appear to be in retreat, and on many campuses across the country it is now acceptable to proclaim oneself a conservative, even to support Donald Trump.
The reformers’ next big project, however, may prove to be their most ambitious and challenging: bringing ideological balance to the professoriate, which now leans heavily to the left.
On his X account, Rufo recently posted an article by Temple University professor Jacob Shell entitled “To Save Academia, Hire Conservative Professors.” Shell’s thesis is that political conformity is destroying higher education by discouraging the exploration of new ideas, which is precisely what academia ought to be about. His solution, as the title suggests, is to recruit more conservatives into the academy.
While I agree with Shell in principle, I believe what he suggests is much easier said than done. It will take many years—perhaps a generation or more—for conservative professors on campus to achieve any sort of critical mass.
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After all, the last thing we want to do is mandate our own quota system in response to the Left’s longstanding de facto quota system—even in states where we might have the power to do so. If we truly value meritocracy, we can’t hire people just because they’re conservative any more than we would hire them just because they’re black or female.
It’s true that the Left has created artificial barriers, political litmus tests, to keep conservatives out. But giving them “a taste of their own medicine” is not the answer. That was Ibram X Kendi’s brilliant idea, with regard to racial discrimination, and we can see the backlash that inspired.
A bigger problem is that the pool of prospective conservative professors is, at this point, quite shallow. Indeed, most conservatives abandoned the academy as a potential career path a generation ago, for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, they could see the handwriting on the wall, as it became clear the Left was determined to freeze them out. Moreover, to put it bluntly, higher education doesn’t pay as well as other professions requiring similar levels of academic preparation, like law or finance.
Why beat your head against the wall trying to get a job that pays half of what you could make doing something else, at a place where people clearly don’t want you, anyway?
Shell dismisses this notion, citing people he knows who would love to have a career in academia if it were more amenable to their political views. Perhaps, as a scientist, he knows more of those people than I do. The hard sciences, like the business fields, may well harbor many natural conservatives.
In other disciplines, however, such people are rare—people who are a) qualified to teach at the college level and b) chomping at the bit to do so. The first issue is actually more problematic, because the rejection of right-wingers runs deep. It’s not just hiring committees that have long blackballed conservatives; graduate programs are guilty, too.
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In the humanities, at least, to make immediate inroads into the professoriate, we’d have to hire people with non-traditional qualifications, such as life experience and demonstrated excellence in their field. For example, I have no doubt novelist and Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan would be better at teaching literature than most English professors. But could he get the job? Would someone like him want the job?
Speaking as a former department chair and dean, I will say one more thing about college faculty, particularly the tenured variety: they are the most intransigent, passive-aggressive people you will ever meet. If they don’t want something to happen, it generally will not happen or at best will happen very slowly.
That’s why, if we’re going to reform the professoriate, we must start early, encouraging more conservative young people to pursue careers in academia, perhaps by appealing to their altruism and natural curiosity. Then we must continue working to remove barriers, first to graduate school and ultimately to faculty positions. (Getting rid of “diversity statements” in many states was a good start.)
That approach, over time, may well produce more conservative professors. But it won’t happen quickly, and I doubt in our lifetimes we will ever see anything approaching true ideological balance.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
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