The Progressive Bias of Policy Schools
Important research by Hess and Fletcher on a problem that can and should be fixed
For a project I’m heading up, I commissioned 10 papers of a variety of higher-education subjects (my report on publics vs. Ivy+ is part of this series).
I wanted the series to focus on issues that get too little attention, like what four-year schools should do about alternative credentials, how to protect the humanities, and how to better serve non-traditional students.
I also wanted to try to answer a question I’ve had for a long, long time: Do universities’ public policy programs have politically diverse faculties?
America has lots of Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives. We are a continental, pluralistic nation. Graduates of policy schools should understand the principles and policy priorities of America’s citizens and its elected officials. It would be bad for our nation if policy students aren’t exposed to all of the best thinking and writing about governing. Worse, we could end up with policy professionals ignorant of, and even hostile to, the sensibilities of half of America
My friend and former colleague Rick Hess of AEI was curious about this issue, too. He and his colleague, Riley Fletcher, took it on.
Before getting to the alarming findings, let me briefly explain the three reasons I was so interested in this.
First, there’s plenty of research showing that most university academic disciplines and administrative posts are dominated by those on the political left.1 But there wasn’t yet evidence of whether the same was true of policy schools. Since I care about (and since this column is all about) governing, I wanted to know if those professionally trained to govern were being shaped by only one side of the political spectrum.
Second, my personal experiences—though obviously anecdotal—had me concerned. I was a grad student during the 2000 presidential election when the American electorate was evenly split between Bush (R) and Gore (D). During an informal lunch gathering that fall, a professor joked that the faculty was likewise split down the middle…but between Gore and Nader (the left candidate and the far-left candidate). Based on what I saw, his joke had more than a fair share of truth to it.
More broadly, though, I know of very few right-of-center professors in policy schools. Many of the left-of-center graduates of policy programs that I know personally admit to knowing little to nothing about the conservative canon. I’ve run a conservatism-and-governing fellowship for several years now, and participants agree that that they never read in college or grad school the material we read in the fellowship (e.g., Burke, Hayek, Kirk, Nisbet, Oakeshott).
Lastly, policy schools have the ability to hire an intellectually and politically diverse faculty. If they want to. Other disciplines hire PhDs all but exclusively, meaning their hiring pools will be entirely left-of-center if PhD programs are producing entirely left-of-center graduates. But policy schools hire lots of adjuncts, lecturers, and “professors of the practice,” individuals without PhDs but with experience in governing. Meaning these programs could use these employment lines to hire right-of-center faculty members (with governing experience) if PhD programs are only producing progressives.
OK, enough of the suspense. Is there a problem?
Yes. There’s a huge problem.
I hope you read their study (it’s short and accessible), so I don’t want to repeat all of their findings or arguments. But the title of the report is, “Top Public Policy Programs Have Almost No Conservative Faculty.”
They looked at the faculty at 10 prominent university-based policy schools. They assessed their political leanings by identifying which organizations, employers, etc. they’ve been affiliated with (the paper has a section explaining the methodology).
Perhaps the top finding: “The ratio of left-to-right-leaning faculty was 7-to-1.”
Sadly, these schools are NOT using adjuncts, lecturers, professors of the practice, etc. to ensure balance: “Among tenure-track faculty, left-leaning faculty outnumber their right-leaning peers 105-to-12, or by about 9-to-1. Among limited-term faculty, the leftward tilt is 110-to-20, or about 6-to-1.”
The problem is found at every school studied. “There were more progressives and more moderates than conservatives at every institution, with no noticeable difference between private and public institutions or between graduate-only and graduate-undergraduate programs.
I’ll end with two important extended quotes from their study.
The takeaways here are straightforward. Schools of public policy and government must do a better job of cultivating a faculty that captures the breadth of views, values, and perspectives that constitute the larger world of American political thought. It is more than a little surprising that this even needs to be said. After all, it’s not as though these schools are unaware of the importance of diversity and inclusion.
In its mission statement, for instance, Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs promises that its faculty and students approach “the challenges of public and international affairs, with particular emphasis on diverse scholarly perspectives and evidence-based analysis.” Well, when it comes to the study of government and public policy, ideological and political perspectives are a crucial dimension of diversity. To state the obvious, right-leaning and left-leaning Americans have fundamental disagreements about how best to approach public and international affairs.
Schools seeking to equip their students for the rigors of leadership and public affairs need to help them grapple with competing views on the role of government, desirable public policy, and the role of the U.S. in the world. That’s why it is so problematic that, of the 58 faculty members with identifiable political affiliations at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, there are eight left-leaning faculty members for every one right-leaning member.
And then this:
If there is any field where exposure to a robust range of competing viewpoints is essential, it’s the study of public policy and government. While one can dream up rationales (no matter how tortuous) as to why ideological groupthink is acceptable elsewhere in the academy, such claims collapse when it comes to schools of public policy. Today’s academic discourse about health care, gender identity, race, immigration, abortion, DEI, or Israel does little to support the claim that progressive scholars are able and willing to forcefully articulate right-leaning views on such questions. Indeed, recent developments on campus pose a particular burden for those who would claim that left-leaning faculty are creating room for robust discourse or exposing students to goodfaith accounts of conservative thought.
Here’s my last two cents. If we care about intellectual diversity on campuses, and if we want governing professionals to understand America, we must care about this issue.
Hess and Fletcher cite the following: Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American College and University Professors,” working paper, Sept. 24, 2007; Sam Abrams, “Professors Moved Left Since 1990s, Rest of the Country Did Not,” Heterodox Academy, Jan. 9, 2016; Samuel J. Abrams, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2018.