No, Professors Are Not Brainwashing Their Students

The American professoriate is dominated by liberals. Sixty percent of undergraduate instructors identify as either liberal or far left, according to a 2017 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute. By comparison, only 12 percent are conservative or far right. Other surveys tell a similar story, with especially large imbalances in the fine arts and humanities. Just last week, a study by Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens found that Democrats outnumber Republicans in elite institutions by a ratio of 8.5-to-1.

No use denying it: when it comes to political ideology, faculty are deeply out of sync with the rest of the country. There are all sorts of theories as to why, including self-selection, anti-conservative discrimination, and liberal drift within the professoriate. All are plausible, and all deserve further research.

In the meantime, a loud and persistent group of critics cry “indoctrination!” Conservative authors, such as David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro, have argued, usually with very little evidence, that liberal professors are using their stranglehold on the academy to brainwash the youth, conscripting them into their radical left-wing agenda. The only solution, declared Arthur Milikh in a recent issue of National Affairs, is for the…