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Closed Minds?: Politics and Ideology in American Universities

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The accusation that American universities are intolerant bastions of left-wing bias and indoctrination has been supported by a considerable amount of evidence and has provoked a great deal of controversy. In this book, Smith, Mayer, and Fritschler attempt to disprove it. They concede that they found that many times more professors are Democrats than Republicans. However, they claim to have found that this imbalance has no effect on teaching or faculty hiring. They may be correct; but in order to prove their point, they are going to have to adduce more convincing evidence than the evidence in this book. Their conclusions are based mostly on questionnaires given to a national sample of professors, in which they were asked whether they saw bias in their own classrooms or in those of colleagues; whether they believed that lack of ideological diversity was a significant problem on their campuses; and whether they believed that conservative job applicants were victims of discrimination.
Of course, the professors denied these accusations. How many people, if given a chance to exonerate themselves and their profession from a serious accusation merely by saying that it is not true, would use that chance to confess that they are guilty? They would not confess their guilt even if they were aware of the bias with which they are accused. However, the main accusation is that left-wing bias is so pervasive at universities that most academics and students are not aware of it; just as fish are proverbially not aware of being in water.
Moreover, Smith, Mayer, and Fritschler did not see that even the data that they reported undermines their conclusion. In response to the question about whether preference was given to liberal job applicants at their institutions, 36 percent of those who identified themselves as "strongly conservative" answered that liberals received "strong preference," and 24 percent said that liberals received at least "weak preference." So, sixty percent of strongly conservative professors think that ideology affects hiring. This does not prove that such bias exists, but it does throw into perspective the denials of such bias by the liberal majority. There is no reason to assume that the responses of conservative professors are less accurate than those of their liberal colleagues.