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<\/a>A recent article in Boston Magazine claims that \u201cliberal professors are ruining college<\/a>.\u201d The author, Chris Sweeney, reports that the ratio of liberal to conservative professors in New England colleges is a staggering 28 to 1. Thanks to this ideological lopsidedness, conservative students at left-leaning schools like Brandeis or Middlebury report feeling unable to express their views in class or disagree with their professors. At Science on Religion<\/i>, I\u2019ve often tackled<\/a> questions of political ideology and culture<\/a>. And as the Trump administration destructively<\/a> continues to drive wedges<\/a> between progressives and conservatives (almost<\/a><\/i> as if it were on purpose!), Sweeney\u2019s article raises a question that fits neatly into that arena. Does the overwhelming dominance of liberal perspectives on college campuses actually have negative effects, even in the Trump era? Yes \u2013 but those effects extend far beyond campus. And professors aren\u2019t necessarily to blame.<\/p>\nStatistically speaking, liberals really do outnumber conservatives among American professors. The ratio varies across the country, ranging from 3:1 in the South to 6:1 on the West Coast<\/a> \u2013 but in New England, the ratio is more than four times <\/i>higher than anywhere else. This matters because New England is by far the leading U.S. region for higher education. It hosts four Ivy League universities \u2013 including both Harvard and Yale, which you may have heard of \u2013 alongside dozens of other leading institutions like MIT, Tufts, Brandeis, and my humble alma mater, Boston University. What happens in New England has an outsized influence on academia as a whole. So when faculty conservatives essentially drop off the college map here, it may be, as one professor put it, a \u201ccanary in the higher education coal mine.\u201d<\/p>\n This ideological skew has many effects, and many aren\u2019t good. Most particularly, it leaves colleges unprepared to teach students anything at all about the 60-70% of the country that isn\u2019t<\/i> progressive. This can\u00a0lead to a widening cultural gap of misunderstanding<\/a> between the college-educated left and the non-college educated\u2026well, most everyone else. Noting that liberals are vastly overrepresented in higher education, \u00a0the Washington Post recently bemoaned the fact<\/a> that<\/p>\n The world of academia is, therefore, different in terms of political temperature than the rest of society, and what is common knowledge and conventional wisdom among America\u2019s campus dwellers can\u2019t be taken for granted outside the campus gates.\u2026Thus today\u2019s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage, gender and privilege.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This doesn\u2019t mean that liberal views on these issues are wrong<\/i>. What it means is that students who don\u2019t learn about \u00a0alternative views \u2013 say, that gender isn\u2019t just a social construct, or that privilege isn\u2019t synonymous with oppression \u2013 don\u2019t have any idea how to deal with people who actually do<\/i> hold those views. The nonprofit group Heterodox Academy<\/a>, which advocates for \u201cviewpoint diversity\u201d in higher education, points out that this constitutes a failure of responsibility on the part of colleges<\/a>. Without enough ideological diversity in college classrooms, students just don\u2019t learn to think like their opponents think. As a result, they often dismiss conservative viewpoints as raw bigotry or mean-spiritedness \u2013 because they genuinely can\u2019t imagine why someone would\u00a0hold\u00a0conservative beliefs otherwise.<\/p>\n This lack of comprehension doesn\u2019t go both ways, either. In a kind of ideological Turing test<\/a>, Jonathan Haidt, a\u00a0co-founder of Heterodox Academy, found that conservatives are better at \u201cpretending\u201d to be liberals<\/a> \u2013 that is, arguing for liberal opinions in ways that reflect how liberals really think \u2013 than liberals are at pretending to be conservatives. In other words, liberals misunderstand the motives behind conservative opinions, but\u00a0conservatives don\u2019t misunderstand liberals as badly. Again, this doesn\u2019t mean that conservative views are correct. It just means that liberals are more likely to be misreading their opponents. Given that liberals tend to be more educated than conservatives, this one-way misunderstanding is a bad sign for political discourse. And, according to NPR, it\u2019s becoming more pronounced, particularly at the highest educational levels\u00a0<\/a>:<\/p>\n In 1994, 7 percent of post-grads were \u201cconsistently liberal,\u201d and 1 percent of people with high school educations or less were (liberal)\u2026. Today, the gap is 25 points wide \u2014 31 percent of people with post-grad educations are consistently liberal, compared to 5 percent of those with high school educations or less.\u2026The same kind of change just hasn\u2019t happened on the conservative side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But is higher education actually to blame<\/em>\u00a0for ideological polarization? To hear conservative commentators tell it, academia is a cesspool (really \u2013 that word shows up disturbingly often<\/a>) of liberal indoctrination. But there\u2019s reason to think that liberal college professors aren\u2019t actually to blame for the uptick in college liberalism. Indeed, students are showing up on campus as freshmen already far more liberal<\/a> \u2013 and \u201cfar left\u201d \u2013 than freshmen of previous generations<\/i>. So something seems to be changing in the water at the high school level or younger<\/a>, leading college-bound young people toward the extreme left in adolescence. In fact, interacting with college professors seems to moderate <\/i>students\u2019\u00a0extremism<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 whereas spending a lot of time around other students seems to make it worse.<\/p>\n So conservative critics are wrong: it\u2019s not that subversive, long-haired college professors are seducing innocent students into \u00a0leftism. The professors are liberal, yes. But the students are bringing leftism to campus<\/i>. If\u00a0the predominance of liberal professors contributes to polarization, it\u2019s because even the best-intentioned liberal professors can only do so much to genuinely confront left-leaning students with alternative worldviews and ideas. A professor who is a moderate, mainstream liberal but has never read Edmund Burke<\/a> (a philosopher often called the father of modern conservatism) can\u2019t teach students about the canon of intellectually rigorous conservative thought.* Those students will then go on angrily thinking that conservatism is synonymous with racism and institutionalized oppression. They\u2019ll never learn that Burke, for example, argued forcefully for the rights of minority Catholics<\/a> in Anglican-dominated England, or that he stridently criticized British imperialism in India<\/a>, complaining that Hinduism was the religion best suited to India, was indelibly tied to Indian culture, and ought to be left to thrive on its own.<\/p>\n So in the ideologically monochromatic modern university, stereotypes about conservatives or religious believers can fester unchallenged \u2013 not because professors are ill-willed, but because they don\u2019t actually know much about non-progressive ways of seeing the world. It\u2019s a (less malignant) mirror image of Fox News\u2019s predictable misrepresentation of liberals.<\/p>\n If universities and colleges are going to actually do their job as the gatehouses for society\u2019s leaders<\/a>, they need<\/i> to include voices and perspectives from the more conservative, traditionalist, and \u2013 yes \u2013 religious layers of the culture. Many well-educated liberals don\u2019t like this suggestion, because they often think of college as precisely where you go to free yourself from such outdated worldviews.<\/p>\n But the fact is that, as the 2016 presidential election reminded us yet again, large swathes of the country simply aren\u2019t onboard with the liberal consensus of the college-educated set. Whether we like it or not, we all have to share the country with people we disagree with. The more well-informed we are about how our ideological opponents actually <\/i>think \u2013 not just facile stereotypes about them \u2013 the better we\u2019ll be able to articulate our own perspectives. Debate will ultimately be more fruitful<\/a>. (This would be a good\u00a0<\/em>thing.)<\/p>\nSo Are Liberal Professors to Blame? Nope.<\/h3>\n