Are Universities "Too Liberal"?

Here's a recent FAIR report on a story ABC did on complaints from conservatives that they're discriminated against in Universities, where they feel that liberals rule with an iron fist.

On February 1, ABC's World News Tonight offered an uncritical platform to conservatives who complain that their free speech is being curtailed on college campuses across the country.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson introduced the segment by saying that conservatives "claim they are victims of a double standard on college campuses," and seemed to boost that notion by saying, "There certainly is evidence to suggest that colleges are bastions of liberal thinking. Seventy-two percent of faculty members in one survey identified themselves as left of center."

ABC correspondent Dan Harris ran down a series of examples to back up this storyline, beginning with a community college that wouldn't allow a screening of the movie "Passion of the Christ" because it had an R rating. Harris went next to a soundbite from David French of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: "You're going to get more political and intellectual diversity at your average suburban mega-church than you are at an elite university." Harris prefaced that statement by calling French's group "non-partisan," seemingly an attempt to make an obviously ideological soundbite seem less so.

...It appeared that an attempt to balance these perspectives would come from former university president Robert O'Neil. Harris reported that O'Neil "says conservative students may be trying to protect themselves from ideas they don't like." But O'Neil's soundbite fed ABC's storyline: "I think there's a sense that, well, liberals have had their way and they've advanced their views for quite some time. There should be balance."

Actually, "balance" is not a major principle in academia, where professors are supposed to be chosen for the excellence of their scholarship, not for their ideological views. But it is a professed value of journalism, which makes this an odd comment by Harris:

"Many academics say conservatives are blowing a few isolated incidents way out of proportion in order to launch a McCarthyesque witch hunt, which is designed to intimidate professors, limit academic freedom and promote a sort of affirmative action for conservative professors."

If "many academics" are saying this, why weren't they included in the report, rather than being paraphrased by the correspondent? If ABC did not want to give the professors attacked a chance to respond, the network was at least obligated to check the accuracy of the stories the students were telling-- and note that the full story was more complicated.

As a graduate student in sociology, I will say that, as with most lies, there is an inkling of truth here. My department is full of people who would, for the most part, identify as politically liberal. Of course, I am in sociology. One wouldn't find the same thing in the building next door where the economics department lives. Nor would one find the same thing if they wandered over to the school of management or, for that matter, if they walked across campus to the "hard sciences," where the real money is at. If there is a "liberal bias" in academia, it's in the poorest disciplines with the least influence on the direction of the University and the larger community. And if even this degree of influence irks conservatives, they should consider the extreme pacifying effect that a career in academia has on these "tenured radicals." Pick up the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology and I seriously challenge you to find a better way to preoccupy those who otherwise may be "dangerous revolutionaries" with irrelevant, jargon-filled, overly-intellectual squabbles. Trust me, if a left-wing revolution occurs in this country, it won't be tenured PhD's leading the charge.