The Purely Imaginary ‘Rightward Transformation’ in Higher Education

By Phillip W. Magness. Excerpt:

"There’s a good reason for Walsh’s lack of measurable evidence for the alleged transformation: Academia did in fact undergo a measurable ideological shift in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, but it played out exactly opposite the assertions found in Walsh’s report, the broader “neoliberal takeover” literature, and similar contributions to this genre. All empirical measures show an academy that is moving sharply and rapidly to the political left.

The clearest measure of this leftward shift may be seen in faculty political identification over time. If conservative philanthropy actually exerted transformative power over the academy, we could reasonably expect to see a measurable increase in the number of faculty who self-identify on the political right. Instead, the opposite has happened.

University faculty have always leaned to the left of the general public, although from the 1960s until the late 1990s self-identified left-liberals consistently made up a stable plurality of about 40 to 45 percent. A sharp leftward shift began around 2000, and left-liberals currently make up an astounding 60 percent of all university faculty.

Sources: Carnegie Foundation Survey of Higher Education (1969-1984), Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey (1989-present).

Faculty growth on the political left comes at the direct expense of conservatives, who dropped from 22 percent of the academy as recently as 1995 to only 12 percent today. Furthermore, faculty who identify as “far left”—a category that usually includes Marxists, socialists, and derivative ideologies in Critical Theory—provided the main impetus of this shift. Far leftists more than doubled in number during this same period, going from a small minority of only 4 percent to 12 percent today—or parity with the total number of conservatives of any stripe.

If any rightward “transformation” of academia happened in this period, as Walsh’s analysis contends, it was so thoroughly subsumed by a larger and simultaneous leftward faculty shift that it does not even register in the data.

A more careful proponent of the rightward transformation thesis might respond at this point that faculty ideology alone does not fully capture the effects of conservative influence on campus. Rather, market ideology or “neoliberalism” has taken root in university administration, due to right-wing philanthropy filling in the gaps from public budgetary cuts, or so the theory goes.

Jason Brennan and I investigated this thesis in our book Cracks in the Ivory Tower by asking a simple question: If neoliberalism has taken over university administration, or the university system at large, who and where are the neoliberals? When did they first appear, and can we track their purported acquisition of power or influence over time? These questions may seem obvious from a social scientific perspective, yet in the world of argument-by-declamation that characterizes much of the higher education literature, nobody appears to have ever tested the claim.

Turning to administrative ranks, we quickly find several indicators of a leftward shift that has paralleled the faculty. Although polling data on administrator ideology only recently became available, a 2018 survey of student-facing administrators—typically the lower-level ranks of student affairs and university life personnel—found that 71 percent identified on the political left. Conservatives comprised only 6 percent, indicating that this segment of university administration sits even further to the left than the faculty at large.

While proponents of the conservative transformation thesis might point out that this survey did not extend to executive-level administrators such as presidents and provosts, the bulk of university “administrative bloat” in the past four decades has actually occurred in the same lower-level ranks of student-facing administration. Between 1976 and 2011, executive level university administrators added about 150,000 new personnel to their ranks. Non-executive administrators swelled by over 630,000 in the same period, with the largest categories coming from student affairs and services. In total, these lower-level university administrators currently outnumber full-time faculty and, by every available indicator, they sit to the political left of even the ideologically skewed professoriate.

When we try to measure the purported rightward transformation, the speculated academic embrace of free-market ideology, the troublesome “neoliberals,” and the accompanying influence of conservative donors are nowhere to be found.

Instead, scholars such as Walsh and others who write in the same genre display a habit of focusing upon the exceptions that prove the rule. They cherry-pick foundations such as Olin, Walgreen, and Koch, or organizations such as the Federalist Society, and elevate them to the center of higher education philanthropy, when in fact these funders and their perspectives constitute tiny and shrinking intellectual minorities in an overwhelmingly left-leaning higher education system.

Even among academic disciplines that the right has supposedly targeted—economics and law—conservative and libertarian perspectives still remain distinct minorities.

Economics textbooks place a much heavier emphasis on pro-intervention “market failure theory” than on deregulation or critiques of political shortcomings. Faculty hiring patterns at top law schools display clear evidence of favoritism to progressive applicants, whereas comparably credentialed conservatives and libertarians tend to place at much lower ranked institutions."