“What’s behind the apparent bias? Is it merely a matter of leftists hiring the like-minded and excluding those who dissent from the party line? No doubt, that’s part of it. But I think the story is also far more complicated.”

College professors are overwhelmingly liberal. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.

Studies document it, anecdotes confirm it, and the right decries it. College campuses are places where the ideological gamut typically runs from liberal Democrat to Maoist, with a whole bunch of postmodern cynics in the middle and often not a single conservative in sight.

Well, okay, not all campuses — and not even all schools and departments at top research universities. Business schools and medical schools tend to be much more ideologically diverse and sometimes even slanted to the right. The same is sometimes true of engineering schools, and often economics departments, too. When people describe universities as homogeneously left-wing, they’re mainly talking about the humanities, most of the social sciences, and many (though not all) law schools.

But here’s my question: What’s behind the apparent bias? Is it merely a matter of leftists hiring the like-minded and excluding those who dissent from the party line? No doubt, that’s part of it. But I think the story is also far more complicated. And this complication makes it very unlikely that simple calls for hiring more conservatives on the grounds of fairness or diversity will make a meaningful difference in rectifying the ideological imbalance.

Consider this: The humanities and social sciences (the liberal arts) derive from two traditions — neither of which is straightforwardly compatible with the way many contemporary conservatives view higher education. The deepest source of the liberal arts is the medieval university, which was divided into distinct disciplines (or departments) of learning: theology, law, and medicine. This model was expanded into the rudiments of the modern university in the early 19th century by the Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who championed academic freedom for scholars to conduct specialized research in a wide range of discrete fields. The aim of this research was both to expand the boundaries of knowledge and to disseminate it among the citizenry to create well-rounded, autonomous individuals.

This was an ideal derived and adapted from the mainstream of the 18^th century German Enlightenment. But as the university developed, it also absorbed ideas from more radical streams of the French Enlightenment, which defined the pursuit of knowledge in terms of a sharp break from the prejudices of the present and past.

These two visions of the university intertwine on most American college campuses today. Professors in the humanities and social sciences engage in highly specialized research, attempting to push knowledge into new areas — and many view this effort as a project that involves and requires liberating individuals from the dead weight of received prejudices.

The result is that academics usually end up pursuing scholarly agendas that are the furthest thing from anything that could be described as “conservative.” The imperative to advance knowledge demands that research contributes something new. Meanwhile, the tendency to relegate all received truth claims to the category of prejudice leads to suspicion even of the established findings of the previous generation of scholars.

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