Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University by Jon A. Shields & Joshua M. Dunn Sr

Author:Jon A. Shields & Joshua M. Dunn Sr. [Shields, Jon A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-02-29T08:00:00+00:00

One political scientist became so disenchanted with life in the university that he has since left it altogether. When we interviewed him, he was already quite troubled by his experiences. According to this professor, some of his colleagues accused him of being too conservative in the classroom. For his annual review, he told us, they combed through hundreds of his teaching evaluations looking for complaints of bias. He responded by conducting a formal content analysis of hundreds of course evaluations. Our subject’s analysis found that 80% of the evaluations never mentioned politics; 16% said he was balanced; and 4% said he was biased, though in different ways. In the face of such hard evidence, he said that his antagonists then accused him of being unapproachable. Though we can offer no independent assessment of his content analysis, his many reviews on rate-my-professor.com demonstrate that he was an unusually popular professor. With nearly one hundred reviews, he is rated a 4.3 (out of a possible 5), a mark that places him well above the university average. He also won a distinguished teaching award. In any case, this interviewee believes that even if he did express political opinions in class, his colleagues still should have rushed to his defense. “Isn’t that what academic freedom is actually supposed to be for?” he asked rhetorically. “Everyone should have been rallying for my rights.”

Other conservatives complained about the peer-review process. An accomplished historian at a religious university offered one of the most thoughtful assessments of the challenges academic publishing presents to conservative professors:

I think it’s a more acute problem with the journals than it is with the [book] presses, because I think the presses tend to be market driven. And so they’re not going to turn down books because they are written from a certain ideological, political, or religious perspective when they know that that’s an untapped market. … With the journals, I don’t think they have to think about those kinds of things, they’re not money-making operations. So, I think they tend to be much more ideologically driven.

In his assessment, however, even journal publishing is fair to conservative authors so long as their articles do not reflect right-wing interests or perspectives. “I think it would be very, very hard to get something [conservative] published in your standard [history] journals. … [For example,] if you did an article on the sanctity of life in early America, I think that would not get published,” he surmised.

According to this historian, the problem for conservative authors is twofold. First, they do not really know what is happening inside editorial meetings or in the minds of reviewers. Second, there may also be a lack of self-awareness among the liberal reviewers and editors that discriminate. Thus, for both liberals and conservatives alike, academic bias is difficult to detect. He explained it this way:

The problem is that you can never prove this, right, you can never get behind the scenes in the editorial board discussions. Because I would imagine that if they were faced with a

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