Anyone following the discourse around today’s higher-education wars may notice a curious paradox. Critics who accuse academia of being politicised point to heavily skewed liberal-to-conservative ratios among the professoriate, estimated at about 4:1 among the professoriate overall. These ratios are even more pronounced at elite schools (Harvard, 14:1) and in the humanities and social sciences (sociology, 50:1) where they matter most. A naïve observer might look at these reports and ask why the universities don’t simply hire more conservatives. But this suggestion is typically dismissed out of hand. Why? Because that would be politicising academia.

The paradox is resolved by the following principle: Academics and politics ought to be fundamentally separate activities, the former oriented toward open pursuit of truth and the latter toward the enactment of substantive social policies. Political affiliation should thus be irrelevant to academic activity, with any explicit consideration of (current or prospective) faculty’s politics operating as a kind of contaminant. Existing political skew strongly indicates an academic environment already contaminated. Yet intentionally seeking more political balance would, by definition, represent still further contamination. This is something of a catch-22.

The liberal-to-conservative skew is not the actual problem. It is a measurable proxy for the problem, or rather a set of problems. First, it suggests censoriousness of various kinds in higher education at odds with ideals of open inquiry. Second, it creates a fertile environment for explicit progressive activism among faculty. Third, it suggests a narrowing of academic activity, both in teaching and scholarship, in which important lines of inquiry are neglected while those pursued are insufficiently scrutinised, thereby creating orthodoxies and blind spots. As a result, the intellectual environment is degraded. This becomes clear enough in critiques of higher education, which may start by highlighting political skew but quickly move on to its larger implications. 

As an indicator for these problems, then, liberal-to-conservative ratios are serviceable but noisy. They are not direct measures. After all, it is theoretically possible for a politically slanted professoriate to wholly separate its politics from its academics, preserving open inquiry, abstaining from all activism in a professional capacity, and providing robust representation of a full range of relevant views. Our intuition tells us this is implausible, and observation confirms that progressive censoriousness, activism, and scholarly bias are pervasive. Nevertheless, too much emphasis on professors’ political affiliations per se runs the risk of distorting our assessment of the actual problems. It creates an impression that the politics of any given professor necessarily compromises their academic integrity, which is hardly a reasonable assumption. It also implies that the health of higher education is a function of how closely it approximates to a 50/50 liberal-conservative split, which is the wrong way to look at the problem.

So, liberal-to-conservative faculty ratios are valuable as a proxy for academia’s problems, but highly misleading if mistaken for the problem itself. Most internal academic reformers seem to understand this. Yet among these same reformers, calls for more conservatives are often taken literally. They are dismissed with references to quota systems, “DEI for conservatives,” potential constitutional violations, or other forms of clear political contamination. As a faculty member at the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State, one of a number of similar centres established in part to enhance intellectual diversity on campus, I am quite familiar with such accusations. Based on the reactions, one might suspect there are serious proposals to include political affiliation on faculty applications and screen out all except those who self-identify as conservative. I am not aware of any such proposals, and believe that this framing confuses the issue. 

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Just as skewed ideological ratios are a proxy for the problem, calls for more conservatives are a proxy solution. The goal isn’t to hire “conservatives” per se, but to recruit the types of scholars who will produce a healthier academia. Since the current problem is one of progressive politicisation, a net cast for those most prepared to challenge it will naturally pull up a high proportion of conservatives. (Of course, in an academy dominated by conservatives, we would expect the same net to pull up a great many liberals.) But this is a byproduct of the current climate, not an end in itself. 

To some extent, this principle should hold for progressive censoriousness and activism. As the most likely victims of censoriousness, conservatives should be the most motivated to take corrective measures against it. As those most offended by the substance of the activism, they should be most inclined to raise objections. Of course, liberal faculty may (and often do) still oppose such censoriousness and activism in either principle or practice. But insofar as they are politically aligned with the substance of such activity, or wish to maintain good social standing with those who engage in it, they may possess less inclination and face greater social cost for opposition. It is not surprising, then, that the most dedicated reformers should disproportionately be conservatives.

Ultimately, however, the primary currency of academia is not reforming zeal but the scholarly activities of research and teaching. And this is where conservatism is most relevant—though again, only as a proxy.

If higher education is orientated towards the unfettered pursuit of truth, it depends on a principle of anti-orthodoxy. No claim should be exempted from challenge based on reason and evidence. The most damning charge against academia is that it has instituted a number of orthodoxies—on matters such as the pervasive influence of structural racism, the socially constructed nature of sex as well as gender, or the fundamentally oppressive function of the criminal justice system. Because these are progressive orthodoxies, those who challenge them are adopting conservative stances nearly by definition (regardless of their political self-identifications or broader worldviews). 

No less important than challenging existing orthodoxies is pursuing important but neglected lines of inquiry. The academy as presently constituted emphasises social oppression over cohesion, tradition’s pathologies over its fruits, the deprivations rather than the gains of racial minorities, and the inequalities but not the material prosperities generated by free enterprise. The picture of the world presented by modern scholarship is incomplete. When presented as if it were complete, or even sufficient, it yields an actively distorted account of reality. 

If the current academic environment is degraded by systematically progressive orthodoxies and blind spots, it follows that the scholarly endeavours most effective for correcting these ills will be those typical of conservatives. This is so, not as a matter of political calculation but of basic logic. 

To be sure, such endeavours are not exclusive to conservatives. Liberals can and do challenge orthodoxies and pursue neglected scholarly avenues some of the time. But because liberals are more likely to regard the orthodoxies as sound, they are less inclined to challenge them. Liberals are furthermore less likely to take on heterodox research agendas simply because their interests are more likely to align with prevailing frameworks. So an academy seeking to combat existing politicisation should tend to favour conservatives, though accidentally rather than as a target. 

Efforts to establish more heterodox scholarly agendas, as seen in the establishment of the Chase Center and similar endeavours, are sometimes described as a “Trojan horse” for conservatives. But this gets the emphasis exactly backwards. It is rather that academia is in need of heterodox scholarly agendas that are correlated but not identified with conservative intellectual interests.

These are not mere semantic distinctions. If calls for more conservatives are a proxy for scholarly rather than political reforms, then they fall squarely on the correct side of the academic vs. political divide. They have nothing to do with whether prospective faculty have a D or an R next to their name, and a great deal to do with whether they will pursue research agendas and develop coursework higher education most needs but lacks. Fears of politicisation, Trojan horses, and “DEI for conservatives” are rooted in misunderstanding. 

Of course, some actors, in and out of the academy, may fail to respect the academic vs. political distinction. Some reforms aimed at intellectual diversity may suffer from faulty design or execution. Even where critiques of such efforts are misplaced, they should inspire caution and vigilance. But if we are to address the ideological capture of higher education, we can neither pretend the professoriate’s politics do not matter nor simply give in to full-blown politicisation. Rather, political concerns must be fully translated into intellectual ones—not as a way of “smuggling in” politics but rather of filtering them out and insisting on the primacy of scholarly pursuit.