Out of Balance

Many Americans perceive and worry about a liberal bias in college and university classrooms. Almost half of Americans view higher education as friendlier to liberals than conservatives when it comes to free speech, according to a 2023 survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Forty-four percent of college presidents agree that “the perception of colleges as places that are intolerant of conservative views is accurate,” a 2023 Inside Higher Ed survey of college presidents found. Seventy-seven percent of college presidents surveyed concurred that “the perception of colleges as intolerant of conservative views is hurting public attitudes about higher education.”

I teach a class at Fordham University called What Is College For? In it, students debate controversial topics in higher education, such as federal student loan forgiveness and affirmative action in college admissions. By rigorously engaging with meaningful issues and listening to opinions they may disagree with, students develop the habit of looking at issues from multiple points of view. Such engagement with a breadth and depth of different perspectives is one of the primary goals of a liberal arts education. However, many courses in the humanities need to include more content from intellectually and politically conservative thinkers. By working to create more spaces in academia for thoughtful conservative scholars and students, the humanities can reemerge as an open forum for contentious but respectful debate.

My examination of syllabi on the Open Syllabus website appears to show a liberal bias in the humanities. The website collects data from twenty-one million college and university syllabi from around the world, revealing the most-taught authors, texts, traditions, and ideas in the humanities. The information shows that humanities professors in the United States assign authors on the left side of the political spectrum significantly more than they assign comparable authors on the right side. 

The French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, author of The History of Sexuality, is the most cited author on the entire Open Syllabus website; his work appears on 50,609 syllabi. Philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble, is on 26,365 syllabi. Many liberal feminists are also often on syllabi, including Simone De Beauvoir (6,549), Martha Nussbaum (4,255), and Betty Friedan (3,815). 

Conservative philosophers, however, appear on syllabi less often than their liberal counterparts. Anglican lay theologian C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, is on 7,862 syllabi. Political philosopher Leo Strauss is on 2,270; natural law philosopher John Finnis is on 1,274; political philosopher Michael Oakeshott is on 1,000; and virtue ethicist Elizabeth Anscombe is on 26. If you add up the appearances of these conservative thinkers on syllabi, together they do not equal Judith Butler’s number. 

Why should we care if humanities professors dedicate the preponderance of their teaching time to economically and socially liberal perspectives? I would argue that ideological imbalances in the humanities matter for two main reasons.

First, a liberal bias in the humanities damages the public’s confidence in higher education—something we can ill afford at a time when enrollments are shrinking and costs are increasing. Seventy-nine percent of people who identified as members of the Republican Party said in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey that “professors bringing their political and social beliefs into the classroom is a major reason why colleges and universities are headed in the wrong direction.” Fewer than half said that institutions are open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints. While Democrats generally have a positive view of higher education, 59 percent of surveyed Republicans and independents who lean Republican said that colleges and universities are having a negative effect on the United States.

Second, the quality of education suffers when professors expose students to a limited range of viewpoints and ideas. The German-born political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that to think means to have a silent dialogue in your head. I help students have that dialogue by teaching them the works of philosophers who disagree with each other. 

In my seminar on global justice, I assign liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice. Nussbaum contends that the US needs to ensure that women around the world have an opportunity to exercise their basic human capacities. My syllabus also includes political scientist Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington is a realist who argues that interfering in another civilization’s sphere of influence can lead to war. Unlike Nussbaum, Huntington would caution against US policymakers trying to change gender norms in other parts of the world. I tell students that my job is not to impart my view of global justice but to stage a dialogue among profound thinkers on the issue of global justice from competing perspectives. I don’t want to make things easy for my students. I want them to wrestle with a range of complicated ideas.

As members of the higher education community, how can we broaden the perspectives we offer our students and teach more conservative thinkers? The first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that there is one. Humanities classrooms have become echo chambers rather than places to participate in raucous debates. We must recognize that and the fact that while as faculty members we are entitled to our personal political opinions, our professional obligation is to prepare our students to traverse a complex world by exposing them to a range of viewpoints. I once taught a seminar on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The syllabus included readings with his critiques of Christianity and rejection of religion. I asked an evangelical student why he was taking the course. He replied, “Iron sharpens iron.” Professors need to assign authors from a wide range of perspectives to sharpen our students’ thinking. 

To achieve this, we need to work toward an intellectual framework of pluralism on campus. Today’s students will live and work in the most diverse population in US history: the 2020 US census found that nearly four in ten US citizens identify with a race or ethnic group other than White and that people from historically marginalized communities accounted for all of the nation’s population growth between 2010 and 2020. Colleges and universities need to prepare students to deal with all sorts of people, including those with politics that differ from their own. Pluralism recognizes intellectual and political diversity and celebrates that complexity as a strength.

Finally, humanities departments need to explore ways to expand the number of conservative perspectives among their faculty. One possibility is to hire more professors from fields in which conservatives tend to earn doctorates, such as theology, moral philosophy, and diplomatic and military history. 

Inclusion of a wider range of viewpoints in the humanities will help students learn to listen and talk to each other in more productive ways. Our classrooms will once more become a place where students grapple with ideas and grow as thinkers and as people. That, after all, is what college is for.

Illustration by Matt Chase