I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.
The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.
But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are openly anti-science on a wide range of issues, notably including climate science, evolution and vaccination.
The absence of Republican scientists creates a couple of problems for Teles. First, Teles’ proposed solution of affirmative action is particularly problematic here. Around 97 per cent of all papers related to climate change support, or at least are consistent with, the mainstream view that the world is warming primarily as a result of human action. The view, predominant among conservative Americans, that global warming is either not happening or is not due to human action, is massively under-represented.
The same is true across an ever expanding range of issues that have been engulfed by the culture wars. It seems unlikely that Teles would advocate enforcing a spread of opinion matching that of the US public in these cases.
Second, it is hard to see how discrimination is supposed to work here. By contrast with large areas of the social sciences and humanities, it is difficult to infer much about a natural scientists’ political views from their published work, except to the extent that anyone working in fields like biology, climate science works on the basis of assumptions rejected by most Republicans. A Republican chemist or materials scientist would have no need to reveal their political views to potentially hostile colleagues.
Economics is exempted from Teles’ criticism, but the difficulties are equally great here, though they do not fall on neatly partisan lines of conservative vs liberal. Although there are a range of views among economists on trade policy, there are almost none (with the exception of Trump’s adviser Peter Navarro) who are as sympathetic to tariff protection as the median American voter. Achieving a balance of opinion on trade policy among academic economists similar to that of the American public would require affirmative on a scale that would make Ibram X Kendi look like a piker.
But what of the social sciences and humanities? Implicitly, Teles is rejecting the view that the views of American conservatives in these fields could be wrong in the same way that scientific creationism and folk economics are wrong. If, for example, a scholar of international relations agrees with George W. Bush and the majority of Republicans that the United States is “chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world”, that should not be problem for a selection committee on Teles’ account.
The ever-expanding culture wars have contracted the areas where academic work has no direct political implications. Nevertheless, there are enough such fields that the low representation of political conservatives needs some further explanation.
Explaining the shortage of Republican scientists (and academics more generally) does not require a complex story about anticipated discrimination, like the one offered by Teles. Careers in academia require a high level of education and offer relatively modest incomes. Both of these characteristics are negatively correlated with political conservatism. The outcome is no more surprising than the fact that Democrats are under-represented among groups with the opposite characteristics, such as business owners without college degrees.
Teles caricatures such explanations as saying that “conservatives are stupid”. But he would presumably agree that an academic appointment normally requires a PhD. But PhD graduates are overwhelmingly liberal According to Pew, only 12 per cent of Americans with a postgraduate degree hold “consistently conservative” and another 14 per cent are mostly conservative. Once lawyers (JD holders) and doctors (MD holders) are excluded, there’s no reason to think that American academics are significantly more liberal that PhD graduates in general.
If so, there’s no need to invoke personal discrimination in the hiring process as an explanation for the paucity of conservatives. Rather, as Teles suggests, it seems that conservatives do not pursue academic careers in the first place.
Fear of discrimination is one possible explanation here. But a much simpler structural explanation is at hand. Compared to other high-education workers, professors have relatively modest earnings (economics, where the outside options are lucrative, is a partial exception). And controlling for education, income is strongly correlated with Republican voting. So, a plausible explanation is that intelligent young conservatives pursue careers with high earning potential in business or finance, rather than academia.
Support for this hypothesis comes from a surprising source, the medical profession. Aspiring doctors face a choice between specialisations with high economic returns (such as dermatology) and others which may yield more personal satisfaction or contribute more to public good (pediatrics).
As a New York times article about the voting patterns of doctors shows, these choices are highly correlated with voting patterns. Doctors in low-income specialisations are much more likely to be Democrats
All medical specialisations yield higher incomes than that of the average professor. But extrapolating beyond the range of the data to $75k (the average salary for full-time faculty in US universities and colleges according to Wikipedia), the predicted proportion of Republicans would be around 10 per cent, which is what’s observed in the data. A cynical interpretation is that, if Republican legislators want more conservative professors, they should pay them higher salaries, pushing them into the top tax brackets populated by corporate lawyers and orthopaedic surgeons.
As Teles observes, the disparity between the views of academics and those of the legislators who ultimately fund them is a major problem for US higher education, and ultimately for the US. But this is ultimately a reflection of the fact that conservatism, in the form it currently takes in the US, involves rejection of the intellectual values of a university.
John Quiggin 
From the bleachers – do I have this wrong, or did Asian economies succeed by not following classical free trade ideas? (I find economics very interesting, and I wasn’t good enough at math to justify pursuing it. I also manage to forget a lot, as time goes by. But this was my impression.) I am surprised if tariffs are really that out of style.
I am more interested in removing unhelpful and unjustifiable barriers than I am in trying to make everything equal across cultures. And in that vein, there is some really nutty stuff here happening since last October, and there is a lot of work to do. And we should worry more about students than the professors, though, if we all learn to behave better, everyone benefits.
Asian economies didn’t follow classical free trade ideas, but they mostly focused on encouraging export industries rather than protecting domestic markets with tariffs/
Ah, good, thanks!
Re “Careers in academia require a high level of education and offer relatively modest incomes. Both of these characteristics are negatively correlated with political conservatism” – here’s some confirmation from my own experience. Which also neatly illustrates how so many conservatives can rail against journalists as “elites” while accepting hospitality from a Koch or a Hancock/ Rinehart…
A year or two after I earned my PhD (in politics, with a focus on constitutional theory) I got a phone call at work from a very senior government official. Someone I had already heard of. This person had seen the abstract of my PhD online and would like to read the whole thing. I was flattered and more than happy to email them a PDF.
This person subsequently became a judge of a very superior court. (I’d like to think I can discern the influence of my PhD on their judgments… (-:)
Later that same week, our real estate agents were due to inspect our home. We were still renting then, and while this has become the new normal it was decidedly infra dig in that decade – especially with two young children as we had. (We were waiting for house prices to fall, as we assumed they inevitably would… too naive to realise that Howard/ Costello’s policies were turning Australia into a honey pot for laundering global crime money by buying real estate at inflated prices).
The agent, who was barely 21, turned up and looked through the house, which had the usual toys strewn about as one has with young children. She could barely conceal her disdain and at one point even gave us some patronising advice as to how people should start buying property as soon as they could, rather than wasting time at university, which got you nowhere. She had a very nice new car parked in the driveway.
I was tempted to throw in “Well, as [prominent government official] was saying when he rang me the other day…” to gauge her reaction, but realised it would sound made-up.
I have always though this incident nicely illustrates the contrast between academic status (recognition for your intellect) and socioeconomic status (making money). People still talk about David Hume or Max Weber over a century after each died. No one will remember the local real estate agent who owned ten investment properties before he turned 30, unless of course he is the beneficiary of a Senate seat from a millionaire.
Interesting right up and I largely agree that the most prominent factor behind why there are less ‘conservatives’ in academia is preferences over earnings. However, I have found that with each year of my Econ PhD that goes by, I am less willing to identify on ideological lines in favour of evidence-based approached and comfort with declaring “I don’t know enough”. This has resulted in me being quite “left wing” in many policy positions, despite not having any form of campus or co-academic based political influences.
It could be that research based careers do change political views, not necessarily due to Teles characterisation that conservatives are stupid but due to empirics becoming higher regarded.
I agree with your view that the differences the low proportion of conservative academics is largely due to preferences over high vs low paying jobs. However, two things to take stock of:
Douthat’s 2024 oeuvre is a mixed bag. He deserves credit for calling out his own side’s “weirdness” problem – “… But the other reason that liberalism is surviving its disconnect from what remains of American normalcy is conservatism’s inability to just be normal itself, even for a minute.” “Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and the Right’s Abnormality Problem” (2 February) https://www.aei.org/op-eds/taylor-swift-donald-trump-and-the-rights-abnormality-problem/ – a whole five months before Coach Walz added it to the diss canon.
But on the debit side, Ross cheats badly in “Why the Manhattan Trial Is Probably Helping Trump” (18 May) https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-the-manhattan-trial-is-probably-helping-trump/ by raising the whataboutist argument –
– without mentioning that the more recent, and more directly-on-point precedent here, is not Clinton 1998 but John Edwards 2007-2011. Edwards very nearly went to jail, because “paying money to suppress information for the sake of influencing an election” was a factor — it was not with Clinton, and it was with Trump.
So whether Ross Douthat is an honest conservative broker varies… with Hunter Biden, yes; with Rielle Hunter, not so much.