Like many readers of this site, I pay a lot of attention to stories about the latest outrages on our college campuses. All too often, we are told about attempts by students, faculty, and administrators to shout down or silence dissenting, often conservative, voices. Many are tempted to conclude from these anecdotes (the plural of which is not data) that there is a campus monoculture ultimately hostile to the free exchange of ideas and that dedication to the pursuit of truth is sacrificed at the altar of “social justice” and “equity.”
The vast majority of faculty live in a non-elite world of lower-tier, regional public institutions and often-struggling private colleges.Fortunately, we don’t just have anecdotes, which are powerful means of galvanizing passions but not well-suited, on their own, to inform our judgment and our policy. We also have data, partly in the form of surveys of campus opinion. I’ve written recently about several very illuminating surveys of student opinion and experience. Now, thanks to the invaluable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, we have a survey of faculty opinion and experience.
It’s a very big survey, with over 6,000 tenured, tenure-track, and term-appointed respondents from 55 campuses, mostly elite private institutions and flagship state universities. The respondents all teach in undergraduate-facing academic units (i.e., not law or med schools), but that is (of course) no guarantee that they all spend a lot of time in undergraduate classrooms. I’ll also add this caveat: While places such as Harvard, Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill are academically and culturally very important and influential, the vast majority of faculty and students live in a different, non-elite world, populated by lower-tier, regional public institutions and often-struggling private colleges and universities. What’s on the minds of students working 30-40 hours a week and commuting to the local state university is likely not the same as what animates Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley undergrads. This difference also likely colors the outlook of their professors, who rather intimately “face” many more students than do their colleagues in Cambridge and Chapel Hill.
There is one other general feature of this survey worth noting. Given the rather high-profile role taken by Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature in attempting to influence the climate of opinion on that state’s college campuses, and given the putatively negative impact of those efforts on freedom of speech and academic freedom, it is unfortunate that no Florida universities are included in the survey. I can only urge my friends at FIRE to remedy this oversight in their next iteration of the device.
I want to stress four of the most significant results of this late-2024 survey. First is the relatively precarious position of conservatives, who comprise roughly 16.5 percent of the respondents. Almost 40 percent of all respondents said that a conservative would be a very or somewhat poor fit for their department. By contrast, 71 percent said a liberal would be a very or somewhat positive fit. More than half of conservatives worried that their reputations would be damaged because someone misunderstood what they said or did, while almost a third feared losing their jobs for that reason. It’s thus not surprising that 55 percent of conservatives at least occasionally hid their political beliefs from their colleagues, as did 35 percent of moderates (and 17 percent of liberals). Since “only” 34 percent of untenured (tenure-track or contingent) faculty reported concealing their beliefs, it’s tempting to say that more academic conservatives at least behave as if their positions are precarious than do those without tenure, typically regarded as the most vulnerable members of the professoriate. Conservative self-censorship extends to almost all aspects of academic life, from choosing research topics and publishing to giving outside talks and teaching classes. In every case, conservative faculty are substantially more likely to hide their lights under a bushel than are their liberal colleagues.
The marketplace of ideas doesn’t seem to work all that well on our most influential campuses.The second point I’d like to make is that things are actually pretty bad all around. Anywhere from 20 percent (research topics) to 56 percent (email and social media) of all faculty reported self-censoring in some context. The marketplace of ideas doesn’t seem to work all that well on these most prominent and influential campuses.
My third observation is connected with what campus leaders (i.e., administrators) might do about these conditions, which are at odds with the central mission of the university. One of the survey questions asks respondents how clear it is to them that the administration protects freedom of speech. More faculty said “not at all” or “not very” clear (35.8 percent) than said “very” or “extremely” clear (29.5 percent). Asked how secure they thought academic freedom was on their campus, more said “not at all” or “not very” (35.9 percent) than said “very” or “completely” (27 percent). It seems like a significant proportion of faculty don’t think administrators, who make and/or enforce the policies and set the tone on campus, are doing a very good job of protecting these freedoms. That our presidents, provosts, and deans can do better is evident from, for example, the University of Chicago faculty surveyed, 72 percent of whom say that administrative protection of free speech is either very or extremely clear and 63 percent of whom say that academic freedom is very or completely secure. FIRE seems to agree, giving that university a relatively high mark in the most recent iteration of its free-speech rankings.
In case you’re interested, there are a few other universities who do well on these measures in the eyes of their faculty. Princeton, Stanford, UVA, Iowa, and Wisconsin show relatively low proportions of faculty who lack confidence in administrative support for freedom of speech. As for confidence in the security of academic freedom, the list is a little different: The top five (after Chicago) are Oregon (tied with Chicago), Dartmouth, Brown, and Kansas State. I wouldn’t make too much of these “rankings,” except to say that some academic leaders seem to have inspired a bit of confidence on the part of faculty.
Now, you might respond that faculty confidence in academic leadership isn’t worth much to the general public, because of the massive difference between faculty opinion and public opinion. This leads me to my fourth and final observation, where you can regard the glass as either half-full or half-empty. Faculty opinion about commitment to DEI is narrowly divided, with a plurality (49.7 percent) saying it is never or rarely justifiable to require job applicants to submit so-called diversity statements and a small majority (52.4 percent) saying that about tenure and promotion. It’s of course not surprising that conservatives and moderates oppose these statements, but just less than half of liberals also do so, at least when it comes to hiring. Slightly more than 30 percent (overwhelmingly liberal) say that it is often or always justifiable to require such statements. Interestingly, respondents from many elite schools (Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Dartmouth, and Berkeley) display low levels of enthusiasm for DEI statements. We can only hope that this evidence will empower DEI skeptics and critics to speak up.
Overwhelming majorities support institutional neutrality at the university and departmental levels.Another more or less reassuring finding is that overwhelming majorities (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) support institutional neutrality at the university and departmental levels. I take this as evidence that the self-described scholar-activists—i.e., those who cannot or do not distinguish between teaching and research on the one hand and political activism on the other—are substantially outnumbered by faculty (many of whom are politically liberal) who take a more traditional view of higher education. Once again, perhaps this survey will empower the “silent majority” to be vocal in their resistance to the politicization of the academy. In that connection, they could do much worse than repeat this paragraph from the famous Kalven Report, issued in 1967 by a committee at the University of Chicago:
The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.
I’ve noted how this survey of faculty opinion can be influential on campus. I close by expressing my wish that it also be influential off campus, especially among those so-called stakeholders whose opinions and checkbooks carry some weight. One of the reasons faculty like me doubt the commitment of administrators to the freedoms essential to the academic enterprise is that they are and have to be responsive to external constituencies, who are (I think) entitled to disagree with my leftist scholar-activist colleagues but who also rarely share the interests and enthusiasms of traditional scholars, researchers, and teachers. The more they understand about who we are and about the circumstances in which we, so to speak, ply our trade, the better. Here’s hoping that better-informed stakeholders can put the right kind of pressure on administrators, helping to restore the Kalven Committee’s vision of the university.
Joseph M. Knippenberg is professor of politics at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, where he has taught since 1985.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
