Preventing the Next Wave of Progressive Radicalism

Recent developments suggest that the influence of social-justice ideology on American university policies has finally crested, and may even be in retreat. Both Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced that they will no longer be requiring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements from candidates seeking jobs or promotions. Harvard, along with Stanford University, has also announced a policy of neutrality on political and social controversies, a move that likely reflects the toxic spillover from the campus controversies that erupted in connection with Hamas’s 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks and the Israeli military invasion of Gaza that followed. Meanwhile, at the University of Pennsylvania, officials are mulling over strategies to recruit more moderate and conservative voices as a means to balance the otherwise (overwhelmingly) progressive slant of its faculty. While these institutions constitute just a small fraction of American universities, they act as bellwethers within higher education more broadly, as their policy shifts often influence decision-makers at less well-known schools.

But before we begin celebrating the adoption of more sensible, classically liberal policies by university administrators, it should be acknowledged that proponents of aggressive DEI requirements, speech codes, forced anti-racism training, and other illiberal policies still dominate the commanding heights of university life, especially at elite institutions. And even once dislodged, they will likely be back, in keeping with patterns that have been observed on American campuses since the 1960s.

And this is no accident: Numerous published works, such as John McWhorter’s Woke Racism and Coleman Hughes’ The End of Race Politics, have explained how Critical Theorists such as Herbert Marcuse promoted identity-based criticism as a means to advance the goal of restorative equity. Predictably, this process of ideological radicalisation elicits a backlash, as we are now observing. And the cycle will eventually repeat itself.

But rather than rely on this kind of reactive process to repeatedly correct universities’ social-justice overreach, we should be taking steps to empirically study and predict the process of ideological capture before things get so bad that university presidents humiliate themselves in front of legislators while trying to answer basic questions about how campuses should be governed.

In furtherance of this goal, scholars and researchers at various universities, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and Heterodox Academy (HxA) are using quantitative methods to analyse why different universities have succeeded or failed in upholding liberal values over the last decade. This exercise focuses on independent variables relating to six categories: university characteristics, leadership, faculty, administration, students, and outside influences. The three of us, all scholars at the University of Arkansas, have taken up the task of analysing the data as it becomes available.

University Characteristics

An analysis of FIRE’s data suggests that universities located in America’s northeast region tend to have the weakest commitment to free speech. Moreover, schools that are seen as more prestigious, and which charge students higher tuition, score particularly poorly. We suspect, as Williams College scholar Darel Paul argued in his 2018 book From Tolerance to Equality, this is because promoting DEI-oriented mantras has become a positive class marker among elites, a key part of the “classification struggle” by which they distinguish themselves as high-status individuals.

Private institutions, likewise, tend to score more poorly than their public counterparts. Only two of the top-scoring (which is to say, least illiberal) twenty universities in our analysis are private, compared to thirteen universities in the bottom twenty. This may well be related to the fact that private institutions generally have more autonomy to determine their policies without interference from elected policymakers, and are less likely to be constrained by the First Amendment considerations that affect public institutions.

It’s hard to say if these trends reflect the fact that young progressive students seek to inhabit homogeneous ultra-elite ideological silos governed by similarly minded administrators; or if it is a case of institutions inflicting illiberal policies on students who may be (at least somewhat) open-minded about accepting ideological diversity. Hopefully, further study will cast light on this question.

Leadership

We looked at biographies of university presidents and governing board officers, and set them against data contained in FIRE’s 2022 Free Speech Rankings. We found that leaders with experience outside of academia tend to be more supportive of free speech than leaders who have spent their entire careers in the ivory tower, suggesting that free speech and free inquiry are now less valued in academia than in other high-status professions—an unsettling thought.

We found that university leaders with experience outside of academia tend to be more supportive of free speech than leaders who’ve spent their entire careers in the ivory tower.

We also found apparent gender differences in leadership support for free speech. While only one of the top twenty universities for free speech was found to have a female president, five of the bottom twenty were led by women. It should be emphasised, however, that this difference might be explained by confounding factors, such as a divergence in male-female participation in academic areas that tend to act as feeders for top administrative positions. (More men have terminal degrees—the highest degree available in a given academic discipline—in business and economics, while more women have terminal degrees in liberal arts and music.)

According to even more recent (2023) FIRE data, other variables that seem to be significantly correlated with differences in ideological climate on campuses include the size of university governing boards, the manner in which board members are trained, and how members view their responsibilities toward their universities.

The average board size at the best free-expression universities was less than twenty, significantly lower than the average for the schools that had the poorest records (with some boards at these universities having more than eighty members). One theory is that larger boards contribute to a diffusion of responsibility among board members, making it less likely that anyone will speak up to hold administrators to account. While our research is ongoing, we suspect that many of the board members at low-performing universities are more likely to view their roles as being oriented toward supporting the administration’s decisions as opposed to providing independent oversight.

Faculty

Scholars at the University of Arkansas and FIRE have put together a project whereby researchers will contact and interview more than 800 academics who have faced speech-related sanctions since 2020, as well as the administrators who sanctioned them.

It’s well-documented that university faculty are overwhelmingly left of centre in their politics; and a 2022 FIRE report on faculty attitudes toward free expression and academic freedom shows a worrying trend toward illiberalism among faculty members aged under 35, as compared to older colleagues.

Over sixty percent of surveyed young faculty said they supported shutting down campus speakers with whom they disagreed in at least one of the survey-listed scenarios; and 21 percent expressed support for students using violence to prevent speech they deem offensive (a figure that increased to 36 percent in the case of faculty who are both young and self-identified progressives).

Many faculty members report being afraid that their words could be used as weapons that endanger their employment. Specifically, 25 percent say they’re very or extremely likely to self-censor in their academic publications, and 52 percent said they’re afraid something from their past will show up and hurt their career, including 40 percent of left-leaning faculty members.

These figures are aggregated across all seniority levels, but likely would vary considerably if broken down according to survey respondents’ career status. In particular, one might expect that tenured and tenure-track faculty would express less apprehension than adjunct or contingent teachers, who often earn less than $3,500 per course, and who sometimes rely on welfare programs and food banks. Adjuncts and contingent faculty often have no benefits or long-term contracts, and so can see their jobs vanish without explanation or recourse.

One might expect that few such instructors would dare offend activist students, faculty, or administrators, although one of us stands as an exception. I (Nathanial Bork) didn’t mind the low pay and substandard working conditions at my Colorado community college because I loved the work. But I did mind being told to lower my standards in the name of DEI until no single race- or gender-defined group had an overall pass rate below 80 percent. I also objected to being forbidden from assigning more than eight pages of writing during the entire semester.

The administrator who fired me was subsequently promoted, and now serves as the school’s Vice President of Academic Success. To give the man his due, I won’t dispute that artificially boosting grades based on race and gender, and ensuring that students have trivial workloads, are indeed surefire means to encourage some nominal form of “academic success.” Whether these students are getting an education worth paying for is another question.

Administration

Another ongoing research project involves tracking the effects of DEI policies, as well as the budget and staffing levels of university DEI departments.

Certainly, the amount of money committed to these areas is enough to warp institutional priorities—especially in Virginia, Oregon, California, and Michigan—states whose major universities have been identified as having especially bloated DEI bureaucracies.

A 2023 report from The Heritage Foundation found that while the University of Michigan employs the most DEI officers of all surveyed schools (163, as of September 2023), it was Virginia’s major universities that led the nation in DEI personnel per 100 faculty members (6.5). Senior bureaucrats in these areas often earn six-figure salaries, while using their offices to explicitly promote political causes.

Students

Having been trained to be wary of microaggressions, many students now enter college with a sophisticated understanding of what to say, and not say, on social media or in classroom environments. They also typically understand how they can leverage the services of a university’s DEI and Title IX bureaucracies if they feel offended by others.

We know that 80 percent of students self-censor their viewpoints as a means to avoid criticism or punishment, a phenomenon that’s likely closely connected to the progressive monoculture on many campuses. Indeed, much of the remaining 20 percent may feel little need to self-censor—precisely because their views accord in all respects with doctrinaire progressive viewpoints.

Donors

In ordinary times, the influence of donors might be a difficult factor to study, as few campus controversies at any given university can be expected to attract so much media attention as to move the needle on incoming donations. But since October 2023, the state of campus life has been far from ordinary, with many campuses witnessing protests and slogans that, at least implicitly, have served to glorify terrorism or threaten Jews. As a result, there have been multiple instances of donors publicly announcing their decisions to pull funding from an alma mater.

Indeed, the prospect of Harvard University losing donors is apparently so severe that Lawrence D. Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, was recently moved to write an op-ed urging unspecified “sanctions” against his faculty colleagues—several of whom he lists by name—who, as he put it, “engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.” As one of us—Robert Maranto—pointed out in a co-authored article, this recalls the tactics of southern governors denouncing “outside agitators” for pressuring state governments to enforce civil rights. It would not be far-fetched to conclude that Dr Bobo is suggesting that problematic faculty should pay for their behaviour through lost raises, promotions, and sabbaticals.

Although no systematic study has yet been conducted in regard to the pressures exerted by donors, alumni, media, and other outside actors, it’s clear that this dynamic will have a major effect on the ability of administrators to impose or maintain policies that are perceived to be illiberal.

State Governments

Many Republican-controlled state legislatures have sought to rein in the use of DEI programs in schools, corporations, and government agencies. But even if such bills survive political and legal challenges, it is expected that many institutions will respond by attempting to rebrand their DEI programs so as to ensure formal compliance with the new directives without altering the underlying identity-based policies. One of our research projects will be to track institutional behaviour in these jurisdictions in order to determine whether these laws are achieving their purpose.

How campus progressives respond to the increasing backlash against DEI—including conservative legislative attempts to thwart it—will have a large impact on the intellectual environment at American universities in coming years. While some administrators may heed popular pressure and state edicts, others may become all the more wedded to their biases, on the belief that the dictates of social justice trump all other considerations.

Before closing, we will report that some of our research has already borne fruit. For example, one empirical study conducted by a member of our team, focusing on the prevalence of DEI statements as a basis for university hiring, was cited prominently in a recently published Washington Post editorial that opposed academic policies requiring such statements from job applicants.

We hope and expect that more of our research will be used to inform the debate about how best to address the turn toward illiberalism at countless American universities. As with many other problems facing society, the first step toward solving it is to determine its scope and causes.