Conservatives Need Not Apply?

While I was in graduate school, I regularly participated in a research program that paid students to taste test food. Many social science disciplines conduct research this way. While these methodologies may be sound, relying heavily on convenience sampling creates limitations. Those dinosaur nuggets I rated highly in my late 20s may not test nearly as well with an older demographic. These sorts of limitations apply when we consider the research on political identification or bias in higher education—we are limited by our sample. 

Consider a recent analysis of political giving from faculty and staff at Florida’s five largest universities conducted by my colleagues in the Institute for Governance and Civics. Using Federal Election Commission data, they found “nearly nine out of every ten dollars of faculty and staff political contributions went to Democrats.” This approach has been regularly used to study what professors think about politics. The only problem is that the vast majority of faculty don’t give to political causes. Other methods, such as examining party registration or surveys, are similarly limited. In a recent study, Schools of Thought: Using AI to Assess the Ideological Orientation of Academic Departments, I attempt to address this limitation by utilizing A.I. to evaluate the research and writing of scholars. After all, every scholar should have a publication record. 

In the paper, I identified 50 academic departments with some overlap with many of the newly formed civic centers. This list includes, but is not limited to, English, economics, and political science. I assessed what faculty members believe using three axes::

• Equity ↔ Merit 
  • Does the scholar primarily judge policies/practices by how they advance equity (fairness/inclusion) or merit (excellence/performance)?
• Centralized ↔ Decentralized/Market
  • Does the scholar favor centralized, hierarchical coordination or decentralized/market/network coordination as the primary means to achieve goals?
• Progressive Liberation ↔ Traditional Virtue
  • To what extent does the scholar’s authored work affirm conventional moral frameworks (e.g., national allegiance, nuclear family, sexual restraint) or advance revisionist ethical paradigms (e.g., identity-based autonomy, cosmopolitan ethics, sexual liberation)?

My goal was not to count faculty but to assess the overall orientation of the department. As the title of the paper suggests, I was looking to see whether academic departments were diverse or whether they formed a School of Thought all on one side of the ideological aisle. The results are not surprising—most traditional academic departments lean hard left. 

After I compiled the data, I had the AI programs create a department profile. I then asked the AI programs what advice they would give to a liberal or a conservative student who was considering applying to the department. Not surprisingly, the academic department skewed heavily in favor of liberals. 98% of the advice to liberal students was positive. For conservatives, traditional academic departments were much less welcoming with just 38% of the advice being positive. Forty-seven percent of the advice to conservatives was categorized as “discouragement,” telling students to consider elsewhere; while 15% outright told conservatives not to apply. 

When constructing the profiles of the departments, I asked the AI programs to provide three core principles for each department. Based on these results, it is no wonder the AI programs viewed so many traditional academic departments as hostile to conservatives: 

• “Education policy must center equity and inclusion, especially for marginalized groups.”
• “Literature must serve justice, inclusion, and liberation.”
• “Equity and decolonization as central to scholarly and political practice.”
• “Health equity is the primary lens for evaluating success.”
• “Equity is the moral and analytical starting point.”

To be clear, not all departments had a clear ideological bent. Consider this description of one department: “’Show me the data’: Empirical, quantitative, replicable evidence trumps theory or anecdote.” These sentiments were, however, rare. 

For comparison, I also conducted an AI review of five of the largest university-based civic centers in the country. Not surprisingly, the centers lean right; and yet, despite some criticism from left-leaning faculty, civic centers are no less diverse than the average academic department. Forty percent of the advice given by AI to liberal students considering the civic centers was positive. Liberal students were only told not to apply 7% of the time—less than half the percentage for conservatives applying to traditional academic units. 

While it is interesting to consider whether civic centers are helping to bring balance to the academy, one thing is readily apparent—they are approaching issues in ways not done in most traditional academic departments. Moreover, they appear to be more open to disagreement than traditional academic departments. They prize “Engagement with Western/classical traditions,” and “Excellence and merit over equity.” As the statement of principle for one civic center read, “Deep engagement with the history of political thought, classical and American founding texts, and interpretive methods as the primary scholarly mode.”

While this analysis has its own limitations, it does something new. It analyzes the ideological orientation not by voter registration or political giving, but by the actual scholarship of the academics that comprise the intellectual core of a department. What we find is that many traditional academic departments—those that comprise the same core disciplines as the new civic centers—tilt heavily to the left. Are civic centers the answer to this leftward-lean? This study cannot answer that question, but it tells us one thing very clearly—civic centers are not merely a right-leaning counterpart to existing departments; they come from a different school of thought. 

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the Head of Education Liberty for the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University.