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In 1975, Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset published The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics. The book drew on their 1969 survey of more than 60,000 full-time faculty members at 300 American universities, colleges, and junior colleges. Their work, supported by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, expanded on smaller previous studies of professors’ politics and ideology. The book documents, among many other things, the divisions between liberally inclined professors in the social sciences and humanities and their ideological opposites in engineering and agriculture.
Ladd and Lipset both became adjunct scholars at AEI and their work set the standard for this kind of academic research. Now, 50 years later, one of AEI’s new visiting scholars, Samuel J. Abrams, has shined a similar light on a different corner of the academic world, college administrators.
Abrams surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 of them and found that the liberals among them outnumbered conservatives by 12 to one, a far higher ratio than for faculty. As in the Ladd-Lipset study, there were differences by type and size of the academic institutions, their selectivity, and by region. Abrams points out that these administrators who work in areas such as student affairs, diversity, and residential life, have considerable power. Sadly, as we have come to expect on many campuses, the reaction to this solid piece of research was swift and furious at his academic home, Sarah Lawrence, an experience he described and decried in the New York Times.
A key takeaway from the New York Times op-ed and the survey Abrams conducted is that, “it appears … a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.” This ideological imbalance in universities creates an echo chamber wherein students are no longer challenged to think for themselves and the competition of ideas has little or no value in public discourse.
Abrams concludes his commentary on the survey in a recent piece with Heterodox Academy saying, “Americans should be wary of any school that lacks balance with its administrative staff, as they set the tone of … collegiate life.”
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Ideological imbalance in universities creates an echo chamber wherein students are no longer challenged to think for themselves and the competition of ideas has little or no value in public discourse.
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