Comment by wredcoll
5 days ago
I was criticizing your explanation. I don't think it made a persuasive case. This is how discussions work. Or at least, arguments.
I also disagree with your point that "schools have drifted in the values they support". It's probably more accurate to say the right wing has sprinted in the opposite direction of the typical values of a university.
I also don't think this has anything to do with a rise in authoritarianism, it's far more likely to attribute such a thing to fear and desperation, whether real or invoked by influencers for a specific reason.
Longitudinal studies show a steady increase in liberal-identifying faculty:
A 2005 paper by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern found that in humanities and social sciences, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 10:1.
A 2016 study by Mitchell Langbert, Anthony Quain, and Daniel Klein updated this, showing Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratios as high as 17:1 in some disciplines (e.g., history, sociology).
STEM fields tend to be more balanced, but even there, the trend has leaned more left over time.
The HERI Faculty Survey (Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA) consistently reports increasing liberal identification among faculty since the 1980s.
In 1989: ~39% of faculty identified as "liberal" or "far left"
By 2017: ~60% identified that way
The National Association of Scholars and Pew Research have shown that students are also trending more liberal, particularly in elite institutions.
DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) offices have expanded dramatically:
A 2021 Heritage Foundation study found that DEI staff at major universities often outnumbered tenured history faculty.
Speech codes and bias response teams:
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has tracked increases in campus speech restrictions, often under the guise of protecting against offensive or harmful speech, typically aligned with progressive concerns.
Emergence and expansion of identity studies programs (e.g., gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies) reflect values that align with left-leaning critiques of power and hierarchy.
Declining requirements in Western Civilization or classical education in general education curricula, often replaced with more critical or globalized approaches.
A 2012 study in PS: Political Science & Politics reported that a majority of academic psychologists would discriminate against conservatives in hiring or grant review.
A 2020 paper by Honeycutt and Freberg showed similar bias in academic psychology departments.
Growing number of conservative-leaning donors (e.g., from the University of Chicago, Claremont Institute) have publicly criticized institutions for abandoning viewpoint diversity.
New initiatives such as the University of Austin (UATX) were launched explicitly as a reaction against perceived ideological conformity in mainstream academia.
The cumulative effect of these trends—political affiliation data, surveys, policy changes, curriculum developments, and institutional responses—strongly supports the claim that American universities have moved leftward over the past five decades. The change is most pronounced in the humanities and social sciences, and more muted in professional and STEM fields.