Bob Maranto and I wrote this letter because of an invitation by the National Association of Scholars. We thank them for allowing us to reprint it here. The contributors at Heterodox Academy hold a range of ideological views. Although this particular letter is directed at conservatives, the advice can be of use to any intellectual minority on college campuses including moderates, and libertarians. Indeed, we argue that if the Right dominated higher education, we would offer much the same advice to young Leftists. The ideologically diverse members of the Heterodox Academy value intellectual pluralism. Bob and I hope that this letter will encourage non-leftists to consider entering the academy. We believe that cultivating intellectual diversity will promote civil discourse in higher education.

I addressed some of these topics in a recent talk at the Hauenstein Center. In this clip I offer advice to young conservatives considering a career as a college professor:

Later in the talk, I also explained how liberal faculty can encourage intellectual diversity by mentoring and supporting conservatives on campus:

Dear future conservative professors,

As conservative professors, we are deeply troubled by the Left’s intellectual dominance in higher education. Higher education should generate and promote knowledge, considering political, social and economic questions from every perspective, rather than promoting narrow ideological worldviews. Yet with relatively few right-leaning voices in the professoriate, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences where ideas matter most, many college students receive less than the intellectually rigorous education than they deserve.

While there are many reasons for the Left’s dominance in higher education, we believe that as conservatives we bear some of the blame. Recognizing the considerable challenges created by the Left’s dominance in the academy, prominent conservatives such as David Horowitz have promoted a narrative of victimization that exaggerates the plight of the Right in higher education. Frightened by tales of radical left wing professors and systematic ideological discrimination, many bright young conservatives never seriously consider careers in academia. As an analogy, John McWhorter and others argue that by convincing minorities that whites will never accept them, civil rights activists have inadvertently created an oppositional culture undermining upward mobility. Why try to succeed if whites will never permit it? Similarly, by painting academia as an institution that systematically persecutes conservatives, many right leaning students never consider careers in higher education. Recognizing that racial and ideological minorities face unique challenges, promoting a fatalistic worldview tends to exacerbate underlying currents of inequality. In shying away from academia, the Right has surrendered strategically important ground in the battle of ideas. It is time conservatives reenter the fight for academia.

While arguing that conservatives should fight to be part of higher education, we know this is a war the Right can never truly win. There are powerful psychological, social and cultural forces that contribute to the ideological tilt among the faculty; thus conservatives will never be equally represented in the American professoriate. However, success ought not be defined as securing an equal position with the Left in academia. To break the Left’s virtual monopoly in higher education, conservatives need only establish a foothold on most college campuses. Even one vocal conservative professor in a sea of leftist faculty can make an important difference to students attending a college or university.

Even as we encourage you to consider making a home in academia, we offer a note of caution. While higher education is a potentially gratifying career path and most professors report high levels of job satisfaction, like all professions, pursuing a career in academia involves some degree of risk. The work is difficult. Though flexible, the hours can be long. Even for those resilient enough to complete a Ph.D., there is no guarantee that they will land an academic job, establish a research agenda and ultimately secure tenure. As if a career in academia is not difficult enough, conservative scholars have the added burden of adapting to an institution that, all too often, regards a leftist world view as the norm. For those prepared to meet these challenges head-on, the academic life provides conservatives with a unique opportunity to shape the future through teaching, research and public service. Additionally, as a role model to young people, a conservative college professor helps students appreciate that not all educated people subscribe to the Left’s sometimes insular world view.

Drawing from the research, as well as our years as right-leaning academics, we offer the following eight suggestions to young conservatives considering a career as a college professor. We hope the next generation of young conservatives will play a role in reinvigorating higher education by promoting meaningful diversity on America’s college campuses.

Go to college. This may seem obvious. Unfortunately, in some conservative circles there is a movement to steer clear of mainstream higher education. For example, radio talk show host Dennis Prager, arguably one of the Right’s most reasoned and thoughtful voices, recently began calling on conservative parents not to send their kids to college straight out of high school. Fearing that young people are vulnerable to brainwashing by their leftist professors, Mr. Prager suggests that parents should encourage children to enter the workforce for a few years before attending college. He reasons that once conservative young people have amassed some life experience, they will be inoculated from their professors’ Leftist perspectives.  While there are many young people who could benefit from spending a few years in the workforce, as a blanket policy Mr. Prager’s advice has the potential to harm the conservative movement. While it is true that most faculty lean left, as Rothman, Woessner and Kelly-Woessner report in The Still Divided Academy, there is relatively little evidence that students’ ideological views are profoundly influenced by college. In an Inside Higher Education piece titled “Academe’s Persuasion Paradox” Woessner theorizes that having already undergone years of social and political inculcation by family, friends, music, television, movies, and public education, college students may have developed a natural resistance to ideological indoctrination of any sort. Consequently, in putting off higher education merely to make students a bit more independent, conservatives risk derailing young people’s career trajectory. Once they enter the workforce or start a family, getting back into education is very difficult. Particularly for conservatives interested in becoming a college professor, it makes far more sense to dive right into college and learn how to succeed in the world of the Left.

Be an exceptionally good college student.  More than most professions, securing a post in academia entails being admitted into a prestigious doctoral program. Acceptance into the best graduate schools is largely a function of how you perform as an undergraduate. For young conservatives even considering a career in higher education, it is important to take college seriously. Study hard. Strive to earn high marks in every course. Join the college honors program. Get involved in undergraduate research. Build a reputation as a hardworking, serious, and ambitious student. If you amass a strong record of scholarship as an undergraduate, you stand a decent chance of getting into a strong Ph.D. program. This in turn is the key to prying open the doors of the ivory towers.

Pick a major where conservative ideas are taken seriously. Whereas virtually all academic fields lean left, there are tremendous variations in the extent to which center-right ideas are considered intellectually respectable. For a conservative interested in conducting serious research on political controversies, majoring in sociology, ethnic studies or gender studies could prove exceedingly difficult. Even seemingly apolitical fields such as history are often dominated by leftist faculty who might be reluctant to work with ambitious young conservative students. By contrast, fields like political science, public administration and economics have sizable minorities of faculty who identify as center-right. In fact, many departments have openly conservative members of the faculty. This modest contingent of non-leftist scholars not only makes being a conservative far more socially acceptable, it gives scholars a fighting chance to publish research that counters a leftist world view.

Even as an undergraduate, seek out liberal mentors. It is important for young conservatives to learn to form good working relationships with left-leaning faculty. Since most graduate programs (particularly at elite institutions) are taught by liberal/leftist professors, you will have to become accustomed to studying under someone who sees the world from a different perspective. As importantly, working with left-leaning faculty will help you develop intellectually. To teach, research and publish in a field connected with politics and policy, students should understand the best arguments presented by both the Left and the Right. Working with a liberal mentor can provide you with an invaluable opportunity to understand the world through someone else’s eyes. More importantly, a good liberal mentor can help you hone your skills as a researcher and learn to examine interesting social questions, following the evidence wherever it might lead. While it may be easier to work with a professor who sees the world through a conservative lens, partnering with a good liberal mentor can help you function and even thrive in a leftist-dominated academic world.

Pick the right graduate program. In academia, the prestige of your doctoral granting institution will play an important role in the arc of your career. To secure that first academic job out of graduate school, it is extremely helpful to earn a Ph.D. from a top 20 program in your chosen field. Beyond institutional prestige, as an aspiring conservative professor, you should seek out Ph.D. programs with graduate faculty who conduct serious, largely non-political research. The best faculty, particularly in the social sciences, try to downplay ideology in their scholarship, focusing instead on straightforward empirical questions that influence society. For example: How do young adults form an identity as Republicans or Democrats? What effect do emergency unemployment extensions have on the long term jobless rate? How do corporate wellness programs designed to improve employee health impact a company’s long term healthcare expenses? If a conservative student can find a graduate school where the faculty endeavor to sidestep overtly political questions, there is a far better chance that the program will train them to conduct research in the best traditions of the social sciences.  Thankfully, the Internet has made it easy to learn about faculty’s research interests. Most departments post the vitas (academic résumés) of their faculty online. Additionally, using Google Scholar it is relatively easy to learn about the research agenda of department faculty. Identifying graduate programs with serious, research minded scholars can help conservative students sidestep ideological minefields that can derail a successful graduate career.

Don’t be a partisan hack. Once admitted to a respected doctoral program, as a right-leaning graduate student, you must establish a reputation as a serious scholar, rather than a conservative with an ideological axe to grind. This isn’t to say that as a graduate student you need abandon your principles or pretend to be a leftist to succeed. In the best social scientific tradition, you should examine scholarly questions with an open mind. Your research should pose interesting scientific questions, with conclusions based on evidence rather than mere belief. If left-leaning faculty can see that you are serious about reaching evidence-based conclusions, you stand a good chance of thriving in graduate school whatever your ideological disposition.

At first, keep a low profile. The academic job market is difficult even for the best newly minted Ph.D.  Any tenure track academic job typically has dozens or even hundreds of qualified applicants. It is a hard truth that in a world dominated by left-leaning academics, establishing a research agenda that hints at your conservative worldview is a potential liability, at least early on. This is particularly true since much academic hiring is done by committee, so a single professor who strongly objects to your views may have veto power over your hiring. Generally, we advise against tackling highly charged political topics (i.e. same-sex marriage, affirmative action, immigration policy, etc.) before landing your first academic job. This isn’t to say that as a conservative academic you need to adopt a politically correct research agenda. Rather, begin by looking into less controversial topics. Know that your opportunities to tackle ever more difficult and controversial research topics will grow as you become established in your academic career.

Have a backup plan.  This is sound advice for any young person with a career goal. Keep your options open. Pursue educational opportunities that are both cost effective, and can serve you in a variety of professional endeavors. In part this has less to do with ideology than with the harsh realities of the academic job market. After years of steady growth, the market for assistant professors in most fields collapsed in the 1970s, becoming a buyers market. Even as colleges continue to churn out Ph.Ds, this overabundance of advanced degrees makes securing a doctoral degree something of a gamble. Unfortunately, for students with terminal degrees in anthropology, communications, art history, or theater, the post graduation job prospects are extremely limited. By contrast, the more ideologically diverse disciplines such as political science, public administration and economics often have ties to real-world professions. We might add that our own field, Political Science, scaled back Ph.D. production when the market for doctorates collapsed, with the result that the vast majority of the field’s newly minted doctorates find work, though not always of the prestige and geographic placement they seek. The ability to market a doctoral degree outside an academic context makes securing a Ph.D. in an area like Political Science a better investment.

For strong students, even the financial risk of pursuing a Ph.D. is manageable. Unlike law school, where prospective students routinely borrow $100,000 to earn a degree, doctoral students with strong academic credentials can typically secure fellowships or assistantships covering tuition, and enough for a thrifty graduate student to live on. For example, Robert Maranto’s education policy doctoral program offers fellowships that includes free tuition and a $35,000 annual living stipend. While this package is more generous than most graduate programs, elite institutions are often anxious to attract talent. If you have a high GPA, strong GRE scores and a record of undergraduate research, you shouldn’t have to take on a mountain of debt to secure a Ph.D.

Fortunately, if you are a college student preparing for a career in academia, the prerequisites for applying to a prestigious doctoral program (i.e. a high GPA, strong test scores, independent research and strong letters of recommendation) are also useful in the pursuit of non-academic goals. If, you apply to top graduate programs and do not get in, or fail to secure the necessary funding, you still have the option of applying for an MBA, a JD, an applied master’s degree, or entering the workforce. Earning good grades, developing a strong work ethic, and improving your interpersonal skills will serve you well whether your ultimate professional destination is academia, public service or the private sector.

As intellectual pluralists, we believe in ideological diversity. Students and faculty alike grow intellectually by confronting new ideas, and considering the world from different points of view. Although our own politics lean right of center, if higher education were dominated by right wing professors, we would encourage leftist students to join the ranks of the faculty in the hopes of revitalizing intellectual discourse on college campuses.

The reality today is that the opposite is true, and higher education is in desperate need of fresh perspectives. Understanding the considerable challenges of working in a profession dominated by the Left, we hope a new generation of young conservatives will take up the call to storm the ivory tower.

Sincerely,

Matthew Woessner, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Penn State University, Harrisburg

Robert Maranto, Ph.D.
21st Century Chair in Leadership
University of Arkansas

by Matthew Woessner, Lee Jussim, and Jarret Crawford

We are indebted to Professor Russell Jacoby for his article “Academe is Overrun by Liberals. So What?” published in the April 1, 2016 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Although the article was intended to critique the inclusion of ideology as one element of higher education’s commitment to diversity, the piece inadvertently highlights the need for more political diversity on America’s college campuses.

We should begin by disclosing that as a conservative, a libertarian and a liberal academic, we reflect a cross-section of faculty who promote the mission of Heterodox Academy.  Our view is that Jacoby repeatedly gets the facts wrong in ways that reveal just how much the academy needs political diversity.

This starts with Professor Jacoby’s sincere but inaccurate assessment of our mission that demonstrates how even well-meaning scholars can distort the views of those with whom they disagree.  Whereas Professor Jacoby states that Heterodox Academy’s mission to increase political diversity “… means adding more conservatives” we view the organization’s mission quite differently. Advocates of ideological diversity strive to improve intellectual discourse and debate by ensuring that colleges are inclusive and permit a broad range of political perspectives to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Jacoby recounts how in 40 years, the belief that diversity is an inherent virtue has gone from a “marginal idea” to a normative belief.  Whereas diversity was once confined to promoting racial integration and cultural understandings, Jacoby correctly notes that, more recently, scholars have turned to the benefits of ideological diversity as a potential social good. Just as being exposed to divergent cultures, races and ethnicities broadens students’ minds, so too can students benefit from being exposed to competing ideological worldviews.

Without directly criticizing higher education’s embrace of ethnic, racial and cultural diversity, Jacoby expresses considerable skepticism about it, referring to it as “the diversity beast” and “the cult of diversity.”  He raises skeptical questions such as, “Are race, poverty, and Asian-Americanhood equally diverse? What about language, religion, age, sexual orientation, income, and appearance?” We share Jacoby’s skepticism about the benefits of many types of diversity.  However, we also believe there is overwhelming evidence that the academy’s ideological monoculture produces all sorts of dysfunctions.

Professor Jacoby revealed his ignorance of that evidence when he wrote: “The relationship between political diversity and intellectual diversity is, at best, tenuous. Presumably, …  a balance of conservative and liberal professors would lead to better teaching and research.  Conversely, having fewer conservatives on campus damages the educational enterprise. But is there evidence for that belief? Virtually none.”

This reflects a striking blindness to the substantial and growing bodies of evidence showing that the faculty’s leftist slant distorts scholarship and teaching. With respect to scholarship:

1. Well-established biological, evolutionary, and genetic influences on almost any aspect of human social or psychological functioning are railed against and stigmatized by radical leftist scholars as racist, sexist, social Darwinist, or as eugenics (see, e.g., Pinker’s (2002) The Blank Slate).
2. Conservatism is characterized as a mental illness in “scholarly” literature (as a “syndrome”). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “syndrome” as “a group of symptoms that consistently occur together” and “symptoms” as “a physical or mental feature that is regarded as indicating a condition of disease.”
3. The leftist egalitarianism that pervades the social sciences has contributed to the widespread but empirically invalid conclusion that laypeople’s stereotypes are inaccurate. Certainly, there is a pervasive presence of caricatures in movies, advertisements, and political cartoons, and these are undoubtedly inaccurate.  Such images, however, say nothing about what laypeople actually believe. Yet, academics routinely declare that laypeople’s stereotypes are rigid, irrational, and that they presume genetic differences between groups and lead people to ignore individual differences without evidence.  Empirical evidence shows that laypeople’s generalizations are often accurate, and they do not preclude average citizens from judging fellow citizens as individuals. Yet, for nearly 100 years, there has been a social science consensus advancing a scientifically unjustified claim.
4. Those raising doubts or criticism about the meaning or validity of any aspect of global warming research or common environmentalist positions risk being tagged as a “denier” (a la “Holocaust denier”). To be sure, vested corporate interests have opposed environmental regulations; and people who believe the Earth has not gotten warmer hold beliefs disconnected from mountains of evidence. This does not mean every claim advanced by every environmentalist is true.  The paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that Jacoby criticized offers another extreme case, published in a prominent psychology journal, in which people were tagged as “denying environmental realities” when they agreed with statements such as “The Earth has plenty of resources if we just learn how to develop them.”  Referring to this as “climate denial” was, apparently, a reasonable conclusion, not merely to the paper’s authors, but also to the editor and reviewers.  It is not a reasonable conclusion, because: 1. One can agree the Earth has lots of resources without “denying” climate science; and 2. The statement is so vague that agreeing with it cannot constitute “denial” of anything.  Such attempts to stigmatize those who disagree do not usually characterize scientific debates that lack moral/political overtones (e.g., biologists disagree about how to define “species,” without being stigmatized as “species denialists”).

With respect to teaching, it is, perhaps, instructive to consider the petition advanced by students at UMass Amherst to increase the political diversity of their faculty. The full text is available online.  Here are a few excerpts:

“Students must be exposed to multiple framings of our history, our economic life, our moral life, and our political life if they are to become thoughtful citizens of the United States, and of the world.”

“The professors … do not expose students to a diverse range of intellectual achievements and schools of thought. At UMass Amherst, we have many academic departments that are explicitly committed to only one ideology.”

Professors often preach their anti-American judgments to students as final “truths”– such as the view that all major world problems, from poverty in Africa to ISIS, stem from American capitalism and imperialism. Professors represent their views and ideologies in ways that make it seemingly impossible for any reasonable person to disagree with.

“Dissenters from Left-Liberal thought on campus are considered ignorant, intolerant, and uneducated.”

Although we are not aware of any systematic survey on this topic, accumulating anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that this experience is common at universities across the country.  Diminished critical discourse, in academia surrounds a plethora of sacred cows and taboo topics, including but not restricted to biological or evolutionary bases for group differences, ongoing discrimination in the present as the sole source of racial/ethnic and gender gaps (in contrast, to, e.g., longterm effects of social, cultural or historical differences between groups, including histories of discrimination), critical evaluations of feminist scholarship, and the (in)effectiveness of affirmative action programs. The rising calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces also functions largely to limit speech, especially speech advocating nonleftist positions.  More nonleftists would puncture the majoritarian conformity that restricts vigorous debate and would create a larger constituency resisting leftist attempts to restrict speech and stigmatize debatable ideas that threaten leftist sacred cows. Thus, Jacoby is wrong in declaring there is virtually no evidence to indicate that greater political diversity would improve scholarship and teaching.

Ironically, even as Jacoby asserts that higher education’s leftism has little if any impact on teaching and scholarship, he then blatantly manifests exactly one such impact by branding Republicans as anti-science..

“That there are many serious and responsible conservative thinkers cannot be doubted, but an anti-science, anti-evolution, and anti-climate-change ethos increasingly characterizes the Republican Party. Any study of the “shifting” political allegiances of the professoriate that ignores these larger shifts cannot be taken seriously.”

Jacoby is again wrong; he presents a caricature. The label “anti-science” is a catch-all aspersion, popular among and readily applied by leftist faculty to Republicans largely because they tend to be more skeptical of evolution and global warming.  However, the left/right differences on these issues are less extreme than Jacoby implies.  According to a 2012 study by Gallup, 58% of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; so did 41% of Democrats. A 2015 poll found that most Democrats want government action on climate change, and so do a majority of Republicans (albeit a smaller majority than among Democrats).  Jacoby’s caricature of the differences between Democrats and Republicans reflects exactly the type of dysfunction that results from an ideological monoculture, where the paucity of faculty aware of how wrong such claims are, stifles scholarly self-correction and vigorous debate.

The magnitude of Jacoby’s distortion gets worse as one examines the politics of “science denial” more closely.  As Berezow and Campbell note in their book Science Left Behind, critics bent on disparaging the Democratic Party could readily label its members as anti-science because a disproportionate number of its members shun genetically modified foods, animal testing, and embrace alternative medicine. Indeed, a 2013 article published in Scientific American was titled The Liberals’ War on Science.  The very fact that Jacoby casually dismisses the Republican Party as anti-science, anti-evolution, and anti-climate-change without considering the Democratic Party’s own intellectual baggage reveals exactly the type of double standards and blind spots Heterodox Academy was created to address.  Self-correction is often hailed as one of the hallmarks of “true sciences.”  Heterodox is sorely needed to provide exactly the type of self-correction required by the repeated caricatures and errors of fact in Jacoby’s article.

Jacoby then goes on to argue that “Perhaps psychologists have not changed, but the political landscape has” and suggests that one should not ignore “larger shifts.”  In contrast to his undocumented assertions about such shifts, here is data from the Higher Education Research Institute, based on a survey of college faculty conducted every other year since 1989, plotted by Sam Abrams:

Jacoby argued that “Republicans have moved sharply to the right.”  This could explain why fewer faculty identify as Republicans but: 1) it predicts an increase in self-identified moderates fleeing the supposedly rightward shifting Republicans, which did not happen; 2) it could not explain why so many more faculty now identify as liberals.  From 1990 to the present there has been a dramatic shift to the left among faculty.   The academy has changed.

Jacoby’s final argument is that “The demand is not to stop exclusion, but to require inclusion – with politics added to the mix.”  We have no idea to whom he is referring as demanding or requiring inclusion (we have not made this claim, and no sources were provided for it).  We do, however, strongly endorse stopping the exclusion of individuals and ideas that contest leftwing sacred cows and cherished values.

We have found two common responses to our views among our (overwhelmingly) leftwing colleagues. One response is denial.  “So what?” “Who cares?” “Where’s the evidence” (asked rhetorically to imply there is no evidence, when, in fact, there is quite a lot and the mere asking of this question reflects the asker’s ignorance).  Denial (on either side of the political spectrum) is anathema to scholarship.

But there is a second response to our critique, which we hope will grow more common.  For some earnest scholars, it opens their eyes to ways that their own and their colleagues’ politics might distort their teaching and scholarship, and ways in which they might be unintentionally creating a hostile environment to nonleftist students and faculty.  They then proceed to at least attempt to embrace practices limiting such bias.  That is all one can ask.

This piece was co-authored by Matthew Woessner, Lee Jussim, and Jarret Crawford.

Bob Maranto and I wrote this letter because of an invitation by the National Association of Scholars. We thank them for allowing us to reprint it here. The contributors at Heterodox Academy hold a range of ideological views. Although this particular letter is directed at conservatives, the advice can be of use to any intellectual minority on college campuses including moderates, and libertarians. Indeed, we argue that if the Right dominated higher education, we would offer much the same advice to young Leftists. The ideologically diverse members of the Heterodox Academy value intellectual pluralism. Bob and I hope that this letter will encourage non-leftists to consider entering the academy. We believe that cultivating intellectual diversity will promote civil discourse in higher education.

I addressed some of these topics in a recent talk at the Hauenstein Center. In this clip I offer advice to young conservatives considering a career as a college professor:

Later in the talk, I also explained how liberal faculty can encourage intellectual diversity by mentoring and supporting conservatives on campus:

Dear future conservative professors,

As conservative professors, we are deeply troubled by the Left’s intellectual dominance in higher education. Higher education should generate and promote knowledge, considering political, social and economic questions from every perspective, rather than promoting narrow ideological worldviews. Yet with relatively few right-leaning voices in the professoriate, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences where ideas matter most, many college students receive less than the intellectually rigorous education than they deserve.

While there are many reasons for the Left’s dominance in higher education, we believe that as conservatives we bear some of the blame. Recognizing the considerable challenges created by the Left’s dominance in the academy, prominent conservatives such as David Horowitz have promoted a narrative of victimization that exaggerates the plight of the Right in higher education. Frightened by tales of radical left wing professors and systematic ideological discrimination, many bright young conservatives never seriously consider careers in academia. As an analogy, John McWhorter and others argue that by convincing minorities that whites will never accept them, civil rights activists have inadvertently created an oppositional culture undermining upward mobility. Why try to succeed if whites will never permit it? Similarly, by painting academia as an institution that systematically persecutes conservatives, many right leaning students never consider careers in higher education. Recognizing that racial and ideological minorities face unique challenges, promoting a fatalistic worldview tends to exacerbate underlying currents of inequality. In shying away from academia, the Right has surrendered strategically important ground in the battle of ideas. It is time conservatives reenter the fight for academia.

While arguing that conservatives should fight to be part of higher education, we know this is a war the Right can never truly win. There are powerful psychological, social and cultural forces that contribute to the ideological tilt among the faculty; thus conservatives will never be equally represented in the American professoriate. However, success ought not be defined as securing an equal position with the Left in academia. To break the Left’s virtual monopoly in higher education, conservatives need only establish a foothold on most college campuses. Even one vocal conservative professor in a sea of leftist faculty can make an important difference to students attending a college or university.

Even as we encourage you to consider making a home in academia, we offer a note of caution. While higher education is a potentially gratifying career path and most professors report high levels of job satisfaction, like all professions, pursuing a career in academia involves some degree of risk. The work is difficult. Though flexible, the hours can be long. Even for those resilient enough to complete a Ph.D., there is no guarantee that they will land an academic job, establish a research agenda and ultimately secure tenure. As if a career in academia is not difficult enough, conservative scholars have the added burden of adapting to an institution that, all too often, regards a leftist world view as the norm. For those prepared to meet these challenges head-on, the academic life provides conservatives with a unique opportunity to shape the future through teaching, research and public service. Additionally, as a role model to young people, a conservative college professor helps students appreciate that not all educated people subscribe to the Left’s sometimes insular world view.

Drawing from the research, as well as our years as right-leaning academics, we offer the following eight suggestions to young conservatives considering a career as a college professor. We hope the next generation of young conservatives will play a role in reinvigorating higher education by promoting meaningful diversity on America’s college campuses.

Go to college. This may seem obvious. Unfortunately, in some conservative circles there is a movement to steer clear of mainstream higher education. For example, radio talk show host Dennis Prager, arguably one of the Right’s most reasoned and thoughtful voices, recently began calling on conservative parents not to send their kids to college straight out of high school. Fearing that young people are vulnerable to brainwashing by their leftist professors, Mr. Prager suggests that parents should encourage children to enter the workforce for a few years before attending college. He reasons that once conservative young people have amassed some life experience, they will be inoculated from their professors’ Leftist perspectives.  While there are many young people who could benefit from spending a few years in the workforce, as a blanket policy Mr. Prager’s advice has the potential to harm the conservative movement. While it is true that most faculty lean left, as Rothman, Woessner and Kelly-Woessner report in The Still Divided Academy, there is relatively little evidence that students’ ideological views are profoundly influenced by college. In an Inside Higher Education piece titled “Academe’s Persuasion Paradox” Woessner theorizes that having already undergone years of social and political inculcation by family, friends, music, television, movies, and public education, college students may have developed a natural resistance to ideological indoctrination of any sort. Consequently, in putting off higher education merely to make students a bit more independent, conservatives risk derailing young people’s career trajectory. Once they enter the workforce or start a family, getting back into education is very difficult. Particularly for conservatives interested in becoming a college professor, it makes far more sense to dive right into college and learn how to succeed in the world of the Left.

Be an exceptionally good college student.  More than most professions, securing a post in academia entails being admitted into a prestigious doctoral program. Acceptance into the best graduate schools is largely a function of how you perform as an undergraduate. For young conservatives even considering a career in higher education, it is important to take college seriously. Study hard. Strive to earn high marks in every course. Join the college honors program. Get involved in undergraduate research. Build a reputation as a hardworking, serious, and ambitious student. If you amass a strong record of scholarship as an undergraduate, you stand a decent chance of getting into a strong Ph.D. program. This in turn is the key to prying open the doors of the ivory towers.

Pick a major where conservative ideas are taken seriously. Whereas virtually all academic fields lean left, there are tremendous variations in the extent to which center-right ideas are considered intellectually respectable. For a conservative interested in conducting serious research on political controversies, majoring in sociology, ethnic studies or gender studies could prove exceedingly difficult. Even seemingly apolitical fields such as history are often dominated by leftist faculty who might be reluctant to work with ambitious young conservative students. By contrast, fields like political science, public administration and economics have sizable minorities of faculty who identify as center-right. In fact, many departments have openly conservative members of the faculty. This modest contingent of non-leftist scholars not only makes being a conservative far more socially acceptable, it gives scholars a fighting chance to publish research that counters a leftist world view.

Even as an undergraduate, seek out liberal mentors. It is important for young conservatives to learn to form good working relationships with left-leaning faculty. Since most graduate programs (particularly at elite institutions) are taught by liberal/leftist professors, you will have to become accustomed to studying under someone who sees the world from a different perspective. As importantly, working with left-leaning faculty will help you develop intellectually. To teach, research and publish in a field connected with politics and policy, students should understand the best arguments presented by both the Left and the Right. Working with a liberal mentor can provide you with an invaluable opportunity to understand the world through someone else’s eyes. More importantly, a good liberal mentor can help you hone your skills as a researcher and learn to examine interesting social questions, following the evidence wherever it might lead. While it may be easier to work with a professor who sees the world through a conservative lens, partnering with a good liberal mentor can help you function and even thrive in a leftist-dominated academic world.

Pick the right graduate program. In academia, the prestige of your doctoral granting institution will play an important role in the arc of your career. To secure that first academic job out of graduate school, it is extremely helpful to earn a Ph.D. from a top 20 program in your chosen field. Beyond institutional prestige, as an aspiring conservative professor, you should seek out Ph.D. programs with graduate faculty who conduct serious, largely non-political research. The best faculty, particularly in the social sciences, try to downplay ideology in their scholarship, focusing instead on straightforward empirical questions that influence society. For example: How do young adults form an identity as Republicans or Democrats? What effect do emergency unemployment extensions have on the long term jobless rate? How do corporate wellness programs designed to improve employee health impact a company’s long term healthcare expenses? If a conservative student can find a graduate school where the faculty endeavor to sidestep overtly political questions, there is a far better chance that the program will train them to conduct research in the best traditions of the social sciences.  Thankfully, the Internet has made it easy to learn about faculty’s research interests. Most departments post the vitas (academic résumés) of their faculty online. Additionally, using Google Scholar it is relatively easy to learn about the research agenda of department faculty. Identifying graduate programs with serious, research minded scholars can help conservative students sidestep ideological minefields that can derail a successful graduate career.

Don’t be a partisan hack. Once admitted to a respected doctoral program, as a right-leaning graduate student, you must establish a reputation as a serious scholar, rather than a conservative with an ideological axe to grind. This isn’t to say that as a graduate student you need abandon your principles or pretend to be a leftist to succeed. In the best social scientific tradition, you should examine scholarly questions with an open mind. Your research should pose interesting scientific questions, with conclusions based on evidence rather than mere belief. If left-leaning faculty can see that you are serious about reaching evidence-based conclusions, you stand a good chance of thriving in graduate school whatever your ideological disposition.

At first, keep a low profile. The academic job market is difficult even for the best newly minted Ph.D.  Any tenure track academic job typically has dozens or even hundreds of qualified applicants. It is a hard truth that in a world dominated by left-leaning academics, establishing a research agenda that hints at your conservative worldview is a potential liability, at least early on. This is particularly true since much academic hiring is done by committee, so a single professor who strongly objects to your views may have veto power over your hiring. Generally, we advise against tackling highly charged political topics (i.e. same-sex marriage, affirmative action, immigration policy, etc.) before landing your first academic job. This isn’t to say that as a conservative academic you need to adopt a politically correct research agenda. Rather, begin by looking into less controversial topics. Know that your opportunities to tackle ever more difficult and controversial research topics will grow as you become established in your academic career.

Have a backup plan.  This is sound advice for any young person with a career goal. Keep your options open. Pursue educational opportunities that are both cost effective, and can serve you in a variety of professional endeavors. In part this has less to do with ideology than with the harsh realities of the academic job market. After years of steady growth, the market for assistant professors in most fields collapsed in the 1970s, becoming a buyers market. Even as colleges continue to churn out Ph.Ds, this overabundance of advanced degrees makes securing a doctoral degree something of a gamble. Unfortunately, for students with terminal degrees in anthropology, communications, art history, or theater, the post graduation job prospects are extremely limited. By contrast, the more ideologically diverse disciplines such as political science, public administration and economics often have ties to real-world professions. We might add that our own field, Political Science, scaled back Ph.D. production when the market for doctorates collapsed, with the result that the vast majority of the field’s newly minted doctorates find work, though not always of the prestige and geographic placement they seek. The ability to market a doctoral degree outside an academic context makes securing a Ph.D. in an area like Political Science a better investment.

For strong students, even the financial risk of pursuing a Ph.D. is manageable. Unlike law school, where prospective students routinely borrow $100,000 to earn a degree, doctoral students with strong academic credentials can typically secure fellowships or assistantships covering tuition, and enough for a thrifty graduate student to live on. For example, Robert Maranto’s education policy doctoral program offers fellowships that includes free tuition and a $35,000 annual living stipend. While this package is more generous than most graduate programs, elite institutions are often anxious to attract talent. If you have a high GPA, strong GRE scores and a record of undergraduate research, you shouldn’t have to take on a mountain of debt to secure a Ph.D.

Fortunately, if you are a college student preparing for a career in academia, the prerequisites for applying to a prestigious doctoral program (i.e. a high GPA, strong test scores, independent research and strong letters of recommendation) are also useful in the pursuit of non-academic goals. If, you apply to top graduate programs and do not get in, or fail to secure the necessary funding, you still have the option of applying for an MBA, a JD, an applied master’s degree, or entering the workforce. Earning good grades, developing a strong work ethic, and improving your interpersonal skills will serve you well whether your ultimate professional destination is academia, public service or the private sector.

As intellectual pluralists, we believe in ideological diversity. Students and faculty alike grow intellectually by confronting new ideas, and considering the world from different points of view. Although our own politics lean right of center, if higher education were dominated by right wing professors, we would encourage leftist students to join the ranks of the faculty in the hopes of revitalizing intellectual discourse on college campuses.

The reality today is that the opposite is true, and higher education is in desperate need of fresh perspectives. Understanding the considerable challenges of working in a profession dominated by the Left, we hope a new generation of young conservatives will take up the call to storm the ivory tower.

Sincerely,

Matthew Woessner, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Penn State University, Harrisburg

Robert Maranto, Ph.D.
21st Century Chair in Leadership
University of Arkansas

by Matthew Woessner, Lee Jussim, and Jarret Crawford

We are indebted to Professor Russell Jacoby for his article “Academe is Overrun by Liberals. So What?” published in the April 1, 2016 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Although the article was intended to critique the inclusion of ideology as one element of higher education’s commitment to diversity, the piece inadvertently highlights the need for more political diversity on America’s college campuses.

We should begin by disclosing that as a conservative, a libertarian and a liberal academic, we reflect a cross-section of faculty who promote the mission of Heterodox Academy.  Our view is that Jacoby repeatedly gets the facts wrong in ways that reveal just how much the academy needs political diversity.

This starts with Professor Jacoby’s sincere but inaccurate assessment of our mission that demonstrates how even well-meaning scholars can distort the views of those with whom they disagree.  Whereas Professor Jacoby states that Heterodox Academy’s mission to increase political diversity “… means adding more conservatives” we view the organization’s mission quite differently. Advocates of ideological diversity strive to improve intellectual discourse and debate by ensuring that colleges are inclusive and permit a broad range of political perspectives to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Jacoby recounts how in 40 years, the belief that diversity is an inherent virtue has gone from a “marginal idea” to a normative belief.  Whereas diversity was once confined to promoting racial integration and cultural understandings, Jacoby correctly notes that, more recently, scholars have turned to the benefits of ideological diversity as a potential social good. Just as being exposed to divergent cultures, races and ethnicities broadens students’ minds, so too can students benefit from being exposed to competing ideological worldviews.

Without directly criticizing higher education’s embrace of ethnic, racial and cultural diversity, Jacoby expresses considerable skepticism about it, referring to it as “the diversity beast” and “the cult of diversity.”  He raises skeptical questions such as, “Are race, poverty, and Asian-Americanhood equally diverse? What about language, religion, age, sexual orientation, income, and appearance?” We share Jacoby’s skepticism about the benefits of many types of diversity.  However, we also believe there is overwhelming evidence that the academy’s ideological monoculture produces all sorts of dysfunctions.

Professor Jacoby revealed his ignorance of that evidence when he wrote: “The relationship between political diversity and intellectual diversity is, at best, tenuous. Presumably, …  a balance of conservative and liberal professors would lead to better teaching and research.  Conversely, having fewer conservatives on campus damages the educational enterprise. But is there evidence for that belief? Virtually none.”

This reflects a striking blindness to the substantial and growing bodies of evidence showing that the faculty’s leftist slant distorts scholarship and teaching. With respect to scholarship:

1. Well-established biological, evolutionary, and genetic influences on almost any aspect of human social or psychological functioning are railed against and stigmatized by radical leftist scholars as racist, sexist, social Darwinist, or as eugenics (see, e.g., Pinker’s (2002) The Blank Slate).
2. Conservatism is characterized as a mental illness in “scholarly” literature (as a “syndrome”). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “syndrome” as “a group of symptoms that consistently occur together” and “symptoms” as “a physical or mental feature that is regarded as indicating a condition of disease.”
3. The leftist egalitarianism that pervades the social sciences has contributed to the widespread but empirically invalid conclusion that laypeople’s stereotypes are inaccurate. Certainly, there is a pervasive presence of caricatures in movies, advertisements, and political cartoons, and these are undoubtedly inaccurate.  Such images, however, say nothing about what laypeople actually believe. Yet, academics routinely declare that laypeople’s stereotypes are rigid, irrational, and that they presume genetic differences between groups and lead people to ignore individual differences without evidence.  Empirical evidence shows that laypeople’s generalizations are often accurate, and they do not preclude average citizens from judging fellow citizens as individuals. Yet, for nearly 100 years, there has been a social science consensus advancing a scientifically unjustified claim.
4. Those raising doubts or criticism about the meaning or validity of any aspect of global warming research or common environmentalist positions risk being tagged as a “denier” (a la “Holocaust denier”). To be sure, vested corporate interests have opposed environmental regulations; and people who believe the Earth has not gotten warmer hold beliefs disconnected from mountains of evidence. This does not mean every claim advanced by every environmentalist is true.  The paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that Jacoby criticized offers another extreme case, published in a prominent psychology journal, in which people were tagged as “denying environmental realities” when they agreed with statements such as “The Earth has plenty of resources if we just learn how to develop them.”  Referring to this as “climate denial” was, apparently, a reasonable conclusion, not merely to the paper’s authors, but also to the editor and reviewers.  It is not a reasonable conclusion, because: 1. One can agree the Earth has lots of resources without “denying” climate science; and 2. The statement is so vague that agreeing with it cannot constitute “denial” of anything.  Such attempts to stigmatize those who disagree do not usually characterize scientific debates that lack moral/political overtones (e.g., biologists disagree about how to define “species,” without being stigmatized as “species denialists”).

With respect to teaching, it is, perhaps, instructive to consider the petition advanced by students at UMass Amherst to increase the political diversity of their faculty. The full text is available online.  Here are a few excerpts:

“Students must be exposed to multiple framings of our history, our economic life, our moral life, and our political life if they are to become thoughtful citizens of the United States, and of the world.”

“The professors … do not expose students to a diverse range of intellectual achievements and schools of thought. At UMass Amherst, we have many academic departments that are explicitly committed to only one ideology.”

Professors often preach their anti-American judgments to students as final “truths”– such as the view that all major world problems, from poverty in Africa to ISIS, stem from American capitalism and imperialism. Professors represent their views and ideologies in ways that make it seemingly impossible for any reasonable person to disagree with.

“Dissenters from Left-Liberal thought on campus are considered ignorant, intolerant, and uneducated.”

Although we are not aware of any systematic survey on this topic, accumulating anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that this experience is common at universities across the country.  Diminished critical discourse, in academia surrounds a plethora of sacred cows and taboo topics, including but not restricted to biological or evolutionary bases for group differences, ongoing discrimination in the present as the sole source of racial/ethnic and gender gaps (in contrast, to, e.g., longterm effects of social, cultural or historical differences between groups, including histories of discrimination), critical evaluations of feminist scholarship, and the (in)effectiveness of affirmative action programs. The rising calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces also functions largely to limit speech, especially speech advocating nonleftist positions.  More nonleftists would puncture the majoritarian conformity that restricts vigorous debate and would create a larger constituency resisting leftist attempts to restrict speech and stigmatize debatable ideas that threaten leftist sacred cows. Thus, Jacoby is wrong in declaring there is virtually no evidence to indicate that greater political diversity would improve scholarship and teaching.

Ironically, even as Jacoby asserts that higher education’s leftism has little if any impact on teaching and scholarship, he then blatantly manifests exactly one such impact by branding Republicans as anti-science..

“That there are many serious and responsible conservative thinkers cannot be doubted, but an anti-science, anti-evolution, and anti-climate-change ethos increasingly characterizes the Republican Party. Any study of the “shifting” political allegiances of the professoriate that ignores these larger shifts cannot be taken seriously.”

Jacoby is again wrong; he presents a caricature. The label “anti-science” is a catch-all aspersion, popular among and readily applied by leftist faculty to Republicans largely because they tend to be more skeptical of evolution and global warming.  However, the left/right differences on these issues are less extreme than Jacoby implies.  According to a 2012 study by Gallup, 58% of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; so did 41% of Democrats. A 2015 poll found that most Democrats want government action on climate change, and so do a majority of Republicans (albeit a smaller majority than among Democrats).  Jacoby’s caricature of the differences between Democrats and Republicans reflects exactly the type of dysfunction that results from an ideological monoculture, where the paucity of faculty aware of how wrong such claims are, stifles scholarly self-correction and vigorous debate.

The magnitude of Jacoby’s distortion gets worse as one examines the politics of “science denial” more closely.  As Berezow and Campbell note in their book Science Left Behind, critics bent on disparaging the Democratic Party could readily label its members as anti-science because a disproportionate number of its members shun genetically modified foods, animal testing, and embrace alternative medicine. Indeed, a 2013 article published in Scientific American was titled The Liberals’ War on Science.  The very fact that Jacoby casually dismisses the Republican Party as anti-science, anti-evolution, and anti-climate-change without considering the Democratic Party’s own intellectual baggage reveals exactly the type of double standards and blind spots Heterodox Academy was created to address.  Self-correction is often hailed as one of the hallmarks of “true sciences.”  Heterodox is sorely needed to provide exactly the type of self-correction required by the repeated caricatures and errors of fact in Jacoby’s article.

Jacoby then goes on to argue that “Perhaps psychologists have not changed, but the political landscape has” and suggests that one should not ignore “larger shifts.”  In contrast to his undocumented assertions about such shifts, here is data from the Higher Education Research Institute, based on a survey of college faculty conducted every other year since 1989, plotted by Sam Abrams:

Jacoby argued that “Republicans have moved sharply to the right.”  This could explain why fewer faculty identify as Republicans but: 1) it predicts an increase in self-identified moderates fleeing the supposedly rightward shifting Republicans, which did not happen; 2) it could not explain why so many more faculty now identify as liberals.  From 1990 to the present there has been a dramatic shift to the left among faculty. The academy has changed.

Jacoby’s final argument is that “The demand is not to stop exclusion, but to require inclusion – with politics added to the mix.”  We have no idea to whom he is referring as demanding or requiring inclusion (we have not made this claim, and no sources were provided for it).  We do, however, strongly endorse stopping the exclusion of individuals and ideas that contest leftwing sacred cows and cherished values.

We have found two common responses to our views among our (overwhelmingly) leftwing colleagues. One response is denial.  “So what?” “Who cares?” “Where’s the evidence” (asked rhetorically to imply there is no evidence, when, in fact, there is quite a lot and the mere asking of this question reflects the asker’s ignorance). Denial (on either side of the political spectrum) is anathema to scholarship.

But there is a second response to our critique, which we hope will grow more common.  For some earnest scholars, it opens their eyes to ways that their own and their colleagues’ politics might distort their teaching and scholarship, and ways in which they might be unintentionally creating a hostile environment to nonleftist students and faculty.  They then proceed to at least attempt to embrace practices limiting such bias.  That is all one can ask.

This piece was co-authored by Matthew Woessner, Lee Jussim, and Jarret Crawford.