An article in the January issue of Boston Magazine spoke about research conducted by Samuel Abrams, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, in New York. Abrams tabulated 25 years of worth of statistics from the Higher Education Research Institute and learned that in New England colleges, liberal faculty outnumber conservative faculty by a ratio of 28 to 1. The rest of the country has a ratio closer to 5 to 1 (83%), slightly better but still an indication that our kids of college are being brainwashed. The Liberal-Conservative ratio has gotten much wider in the past twenty-five years.
“It astonished me,” said Abrams, whose research revealed that conservative professors weren’t just rare; they were being pushed to the edge of extinction (…)Creative problem-solving is going to suffer,” Abrams says, arguing that ideological homogeneity does not prepare students for life after graduation. “The goal of college is to give you multiple viewpoints and to grow your mind, not to just be comfortable in your own bubble. The real world is not full of progressives.”
To prove the point, Boston Magazine interviewed some students at Brandies a New England school and “among the 35 most competitive universities in the country.”
They found that there are some conservative students at the school “but those on the right are admittedly fearful of sharing their views.”
Politics is something I don’t talk about with many people at all because of the ramifications,” says Mark Gimelstein, a senior at Brandeis and president of Brandeis Conservatives. A small campus group, it drew a handful of attendees to the weekly meetings I sat in on throughout October. None supported Trump; one student present was a liberal who kept showing up because he enjoyed the conversation; and several other members leaned more libertarian than conservative.
Gimelstein speaks highly of the quality of education he’s received, but says there is an undeniable liberal slant among his professors that has ranged over the years from annoying to detrimental. “My intro to microeconomics course, I won’t name the professor, but he literally yelled that he hated Republicans in class,” Gimelstein says. Though it was intended to be more humorous than mean-spirited, it had a chilling effect. “While all my classmates were laughing along, I wasn’t laughing,” he says. “It was kind of insulting and it made it harder to have a productive conversation.”
“Another student, Michael Musto, a senior explained that when conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly died “one of his professors quipped, ‘There’s a special place in hell for people like her.'” But only a month later when liberal activist Tom Hayden passed away, that same professor gave Hayden glowing eulogy.
“The average student who is just trying to study gets the impression of, ‘Oh man, those evil right-wingers,’” says Musto, who identifies as a Libertarian. Frustrating as it is for him, Musto keeps a low profile for fear of being that guy in the eyes of the person who will be grading his papers. Like other Brandeis conservatives, he says, “I never really speak up.”
(…) A few days after midterms, Ben, the Brandeis freshman who didn’t want to use his name for fear of being outed as a conservative, finally agreed to an interview. When he signed on to attend the famously progressive school, he knew its history of social justice as well as its liberal reputation. The first few weeks on campus had their ups and downs, he told me, but after watching his professor make fun of Republicans in class and gauging just how seriously other students took their progressive beliefs, he decided the only truly safe space was in the political closet. “Politics is a big part of who I am,” he confides. “I definitely spend a lot of my downtime reading or listening to news and politics-related content. [At Brandeis], I have done that in secret.”
Then there’s the case of James Miller economics professor at Smith College who made the mistake of writing an op-ed in National Review “in which he asserted that the dominance of liberals in academia skews scholarship to the point that aspiring professors are forced to pursue research pleasing to the liberal gatekeepers, who grant or deny tenure with the ruthlessness of Caesar at the Roman Forum.
(…)When Miller came up for tenure the following year, he was denied by two votes. In letters explaining why board members voted for or against Miller, one of the professors wrote that she voted against him because Miller had publicly criticized the economics of tenure policies in his book. Another professor wrote that she found the views expressed in Miller’s National Review op-ed to be disturbing. “They didn’t say I was wrong,” Miller says, still sounding defensive more than a decade later. “They said I shouldn’t have said that.”
