Ideology in the College Classroom

The Cohen Center at Brandeis has published another very interesting and valuable study, this one entitled “Ideology in the Classroom: How Faculty at US Universities Navigate Politics and Pedagogy Amid Federal Pressure Over Viewpoint Diversity and Antisemitism.”

The goal: to look at “how faculty at US universities think about contentious political issues and how these issues are addressed in the classroom.” This is, of course, a major issue this year, with the post-October-7 actions at so many campuses and more recently the Trump administration’s pressure on universities to clamp down on antisemitism and disruptive forms of campus activism.

The study’s conclusion is optimistic: while “More than two thirds of faculty identified as liberal,” “their opinions differed with respect to specific political issues.” Moreover, “Notwithstanding their own political views, only a minority of faculty had been involved in activism….” As to activism in the classroom, “Many contentious issues that dominate news headlines do not come up often in college classes.” And as to Israel, "more than three quarters of the faculty in our sample reported that, over the past academic year, the Israel-Palestine conflict never came up in class discussions, and less than 10% reported actively teaching about it.”

All of this is good news, but in my view not conclusive evidence about activism among faculty members.  Why not?

First, the sample consisted of faculty at 146 research universities. That includes, for example, Georgia Tech, Idaho State, BYU, Montana State, Baylor, Colorado School of Mines,  Mississippi State, Texas Tech, University of Montana, University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming. Would the results be the same if such schools (“red state universities” and tech schools) were excluded? Would they be the same in the Ivy League, or in the top 25 or 50 “prestige” schools? It’s worth finding out, and I believe the Cohen Center will get around to mining those statistics.

Second, some of the results are less reassuring. Sixty-nine percent of the college professors disagree with the view that sex is determined at birth. Fifty-four percent say Israel is an apartheid state (see page 10 of the study). Those are striking numbers. They matter less if that bias never enters the classroom, but is that the case? I was struck that 45% of all professors said they had taught about racism in America. It seems unlikely to me that racism it actually “fit” into the curriculum of 45% of all courses, so I wonder if professors were dragging it in, into all sorts of courses where it is irrelevant. Sixty-five percent of humanities professors said they had taught about racism in America. Really? Did it fit in all those courses or is it being jammed in everywhere (see page 15 of the study). 

I’m also struck (see page 18 of the study) that so many humanities professors (30%) and STEM professors (24%) said they taught about Israel while presenting a variety of perspectives but pointing out that some were “more justified than others.” These are STEM or humanities profs, who presumably lack the expertise needed to teach about Israel and “Israeli apartheid”—yet they did so in a way that, as the study says, “would privilege one perspective over another.” No prizes for guessing what in most cases that "perspective" was.

These arguments aside, I was struck by how very few “activists” there seem to be among the faculties. For example, only “6% of faculty who either strongly agreed or strongly disagreed that Israel is an apartheid state, said they would help students see that there is only one legitimate perspective on this controversy.” The study concludes that “The one-dimensional portrayal of US universities as bastions of the political left filled with ‘woke’ faculty who impose their views on students is at odds with the findings of this study. The emerging picture of faculty members’ political views and their engagement with political controversies in the classroom suggests that, although faculty at research intensive universities mostly identify as liberal, overwhelmingly, they want to be good teachers and give students a nuanced understanding of controversial issues.”

But what about the small group of faculty that differs from this description? The study notes that “Clearly, some faculty have taught about complex political issues in an uncritical, unnuanced, and unscholarly way or otherwise acted in ways that discriminate against students based on their politics, religion, or ethnicity. Government and university rules already prohibit much of this conduct, and university administrators—working in conjunction with faculty committees— already have substantial power to regulate faculty behavior.”

Quite so, but that conclusion does give rise to an important question. Given that the number of faculty who violated rules and laws was so small, why was it so hard to discipline them? Why did university boards of trustees, and presidents and provosts, and faculties themselves, fail in their duties—fail to uphold their own stated standards and to protect students?

That question is beyond the scope of this Cohen Center study, but is an important one if future abuses are to be prevented. Was it incompetence? Cowardice? Ignorance of what was going on, on their own campuses? Simply their own political biases? Whatever the answers, it can be hoped that the excesses of those faculty members have now been fully recognized, and it can also be hoped that government pressure will shape up those who would rather have continued to ignore the problems festering right under their noses. It would have been far better had universities policed themselves and cured themselves, but in all too many cases they did not do it. Judging by the new agreement between the federal government and Columbia University, and by the agreements with other prestigious universities that will likely follow it, government pressure is having an extremely salutary effect.