Frederick M. Hess and Riley Fletcher at the Manhattan Institute:
Setting aside concerns about the broader shape of the American professoriate, we examined faculty at leading public affairs programs, where faculty focus explicitly on government, civic leadership, and public policy. Among the 10 programs and 443 teaching faculty members who had identifiable affiliations, those with left-leaning affiliations outnumbered their right-leaning counterparts 7-to-1.
The leftward tilt was more pronounced among tenure-track faculty than among limited-term faculty, but the progressive lean was still 6-to-1 even among the latter group. This is especially important because these positions could—and should—help promote a healthy ideological balance. These patterns were broadly consistent across all 10 schools, with right-leaning faculty dramatically outnumbered by left-leaning (and centrist) faculty in every case.
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.”[14] 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.
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 good-faith accounts of conservative thought.
