No, Professors Are Not Brainwashing Their Students

No, Professors Are Not Brainwashing Their Students

Jeffrey Sachs

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Feb 4, 2020 · 9 min read

The American professoriate is dominated by liberals. Sixty percent of undergraduate instructors identify as either liberal or far left, according to a 2017 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute. By comparison, only 12 percent are conservative or far right. Other surveys tell a similar story, with especially large imbalances in the fine arts and humanities. Just last week, a study by Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens found that Democrats outnumber Republicans in elite institutions by a ratio of 8.5-to-1.

No use denying it: when it comes to political ideology, faculty are deeply out of sync with the rest of the country. There are all sorts of theories as to why, including self-selection, anti-conservative discrimination, and liberal drift within the professoriate. All are plausible, and all deserve further research.

In the meantime, a loud and persistent group of critics cry “indoctrination!” Conservative authors, such as David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro, have argued, usually with very little evidence, that liberal professors are using their stranglehold on the academy to brainwash the youth, conscripting them into their radical left-wing agenda. The only solution, declared Arthur Milikh in a recent issue of National Affairs, is for the federal government to financially cripple higher ed.

But facts, I have been reliably informed, don’t care about your feelings. And in this particular instance, the facts are clear. Yes, it is true that liberals dominate the academy. And yes, I agree that this is a problem. But the worst fears of conservatives — that liberal faculty are brainwashing their students — are simply not true. And we can prove it.

The Indoctrination Thesis

Superficially, the Indoctrination Thesis makes sense. College graduates tend to be more liberal than their non-graduate peers and are more likely to support the Democratic Party. This disparity was on full display during the 2016 election, when 52 percent of voters with college degrees supported Hillary Clinton versus just 43 percent who voted for Trump. Given the overwhelming dominance of liberals within the professoriate, the explanation seems obvious: faculty are brainwashing students.

But the problem here is equally obvious. For a host of socio-economic reasons, the kinds of people who attend university are already more likely to be liberal. Relevant factors include parental wealth, educational status, and a belief in gender egalitarianism (which has been shown to be strongly related to high schoolers’ decision to attend university). So it’s no wonder that even before they set foot on campus, college freshmen are already significantly more likely to self-identify as liberal than conservative. These same confounding variables persist after graduation as well. In so far as receiving a diploma is associated with increased earnings or living near a city, there is a strong and growing tendency for university graduates to lean liberal.

All of this means that simply comparing undergraduate students or college graduates to the general population is like comparing apples to oranges. Instead, we need to compare them to their socio-economic peers.

Which is precisely what researchers have done, and their findings are stark. Attending a university or college has little-to-no influence on a student’s partisan or political identity. Moreover, what influence it does have is likely mediated through actors other than faculty.

Don’t believe me? In one of the most rigorous studies of its kind, researchers use data from the General Social Survey to directly compare the political attitudes of sibling pairs. This allowed them to see how college graduation affects political attitudes while also controlling for family background, upbringing, etc. They found that once these other factors are accounted for, the liberalizing effect of college disappears.

Other studies tell a similar tale. In a 2008 article, scholars use data surveying the same students twice, first as freshmen and then again as seniors. Drawing on responses from more than 6500 undergrads from 38 private institutions (including many elite liberal arts colleges), they find that, while students do grow more liberal, they do so at a rate and to a degree indistinguishable from their non-college peers.

They also report that faculty composition (a university’s ratio of liberal-to-conservative professors) has no relationship on whether or how students’ political beliefs change. Sociologist Kyle Dodson goes further, showing that students who report the most contact with faculty — and therefore would presumably be most susceptible to indoctrination — actually grow more moderate in their political beliefs. The liberals become more conservative, the conservatives becoming more liberal, and everyone else chugs along unchanged.

So What Does College Do?

It wasn’t always this way. Data from the 1940s to 1970s show that there used to be a strong relationship between college attendance and political liberalism. But the link has been weakening for decades, probably because of hardening political attitudes among freshmen. High schoolers also have a much wider range of colleges and universities to choose from, making it easier to find an institution that matches their pre-existing beliefs.

But none of this means higher education has no political effect. College graduates are more likely to be politically active than their non-graduate peers, especially if they major in the social sciences. They also tend to be more politically knowledgeable, as shown in a recent study of identical twins. And while college seems to have little impact on whether a student is liberal or conservative, a number of studies find that it does make them more supportive of civil liberties and gender egalitarianism, though not less religious.

However, even these changes are more likely due to the influence of peers (i.e., other students) than faculty. Indeed, one of the best predictors of whether a student’s political views will change in university is their degree of social embeddedness. The more involved a student is in campus clubs, Greek life, or athletics, the more likely he or she will adopt their peers’ political views. Students want to fit in, and that pressure affects their politics. But it’s not the approval of their faculty they crave. It’s their classmates.

Thus, while college graduates do tend to be more liberal than non-graduates, it is unlikely that college itself is responsible. On the contrary, someone who enters college a conservative will almost certainly leave as one. The same happens with liberals.

Some changes take place, especially in terms of general political knowledge, activism, and attitudes toward gender equality and civil rights. But anything beyond this is more likely due to socialization and peer pressure. Faculty have very little to do with it.

Trying, but Failing?

But hold on. Couldn’t it be that faculty are trying to indoctrinate students, but are just failing at it? This would confirm many conservatives’ worst fears, while still explaining why professors have such minimal effect.

It’s possible. Studies show that many students, especially white male ones, believe that their professors are politically biased. Testing this empirically, one experiment found that students are quite good at identifying their professor’s political ideology, suggesting that faculty may be unable (or unwilling) to check their politics at the classroom door. However, students also consistently rate their professors as being more moderate than faculty members rate themselves, suggesting that while professors are not concealing their politics, they are succeeding in muting them.

But there are more compelling reasons to doubt that even attempted indoctrination takes place in any generalizable way. The first is simply that, as shown above, faculty have little-to-no effect on students’ political views. Given their sustained proximity, one would think that if professors really were trying to brainwash their students, there would be some sign of it having an effect.

Second, there is little evidence that faculty are making use of their most powerful tool for enforcing political orthodoxy: grading. After taking account of non-political factors (e.g., course of study, family background, etc.), almost all the difference between liberal and conservative grades disappears. A tiny residual effect remains for some kinds of social conservatives, whose grades tend to fall to a slightly greater extent than liberals’ during the transition to college. However, the difference is extremely small. On a 7-point scale, the gap between the GPA of the most liberal student and the most conservative one is just 0.16. And even this may be explained by some other, unobserved variable.

Lastly, conservative and liberal students both report high levels of satisfaction with their time in college. According to a 2017 survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 91.7 percent of very liberal students say that are satisfied with their college experience. Among very conservative students, that number drops to… 90.7 percent. And while sociological research shows that many conservative students believe they face unique challenges on campus, they also insist that these are far from insurmountable.

The Value of Viewpoint Diversity

The evidence is clear: Liberal indoctrination does not happen, or happens so weakly and sporadically that it makes little difference. Can professors change their students’ politics? Sure, from time to time and in marginal ways, but it is uncommon and hardly nefarious. Professors are not the monsters that conservative critics paint them to be. Every once in a while, they’ll even admit it.

But that does not mean we shouldn’t care about the gaping political imbalance in the professoriate. There are other reasons to be concerned about the dearth of conservative faculty, even if indoctrination is a myth.

First, we should care because the public cares. There is enormous skepticism toward the academy right now, bordering in some cases on outright hostility. According to a 2019 Pew survey, just 33 percent of Republicans believe that universities are making a positive contribution to the country, down from 54 percent in 2015. Much of this is driven by the perception that faculty are bringing their politics into the classroom, which a whopping 79 percent of Republicans believe to be true. Academics can take some solace in knowing that these beliefs are wrong, but that will be small comfort if they lose the support of GOP legislators.

We are already getting a glimpse of what it means for higher ed to become just another a partisan issue: cuts to state spending, attacks on professors, and threats to institutional autonomy. While getting more conservatives into the faculty lounge won’t reverse anything on its own, it’s a start.

Second, we should care because students care. Conservative professors are often mentors to their right-leaning students. They supervise projects, serve as faculty advisors for clubs, and act as role models to impressionable young people. Crucially, they can also help students to channel their activism in healthy directions. When UCLA’s Bruin Republicans wanted to host Milo Yiannopoulos on campus, it wasn’t the outrage of their liberal peers that dissuaded them. It was their conservative faculty advisor.

And lastly, we should care about liberal dominance in the academy because it is almost certainly distorting research, especially in the social sciences and humanities. I don’t want to overstate the problem; the vast majority of research is unaffected by political ideology. But some probably is, and that should concern us. Depending on the topic, conservatives and liberals may ask different questions, adopt different methods, and reach different conclusions. The absence of other sorts of diversity (e.g., racial, gender, nationality) should still concern us more. But political diversity ought to be on that list as well.

Getting Over Indoctrination

Being a conservative student can be hard. Being any kind of student can be hard! But conservative students face, if not the most difficult challenge, then perhaps a unique and relatively unappreciated one. In so far as campuses are liberal spaces, being someone who doesn’t fit in can feel frustrating and lonely. That’s why I urge my fellow faculty to take this challenge seriously and try to do something about it, beginning with acknowledging that the academy’s political imbalance is a problem.

But conservatives who care about the truth also have an obligation. They need to accept that the Indoctrination Theory is false and that students are not being brainwashed.

This may be a hard pill to swallow, given how deeply within the conservative worldview the theory is ingrained. That may be especially true right now, when skepticism toward universities is at an all-time high. But facts are stubborn things.

If conservatives don’t want to accept the evidence, they had better produce some pretty convincing arguments to the contrary. Otherwise, it may not be the students who are brainwashed.