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A Closer Look at Ideology and Truth on Campus: A Response to Eppard and Mackey
In their recent Contexts article “Ideology Versus Truth on Campus,” Lawence Eppard and Jacob Mackey explore descriptive statistics of voter registration, political donations, and political ideologies of professors. The data show that professors in the United States tend to be more liberal and Democratic than the average American. Eppard and Mackey interpret this to be the result of liberal bias in academia and argue that it should be rectified through administrative intervention, asserting that by employing more conservatives, academia can win back public trust. I agree that academia needs increased diversity, but Eppard and Mackey’s article misses the mark by failing to consider broader social structural shifts in politics, by suggesting an unrealistic fix that strips professors of their already dwindling power, and by placing academic political ideology in a U.S.-centric dichotomy. The authors faced a challenge writing with limited space, but these issues bear further examination.
Eppard and Mackey argue that professors have become more liberal since 1989 and imply that this shift is a result of ideological discrimination within academia. However, they fail to address how the political right in the United States shifted during this time period. A cogent example of this that spans disciplines and has been the subject of extensive sociological research is climate change. Dunlap, McCright, and Yarosh (2016) have documented a growing split between Republicans and Democrats on anthropogenic climate change. Fewer Republicans believed in anthropogenic climate change in 2016 (43%) than in 2001 (53%), despite increasing and overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. This is not by accident, either. The book Merchants of Doubt traces the roots of the climate denialism movement and finds that doubt, misinformation, and shoddy science were strategies of a concerted campaign. Republican candidates have leaned into this with their official 2024 party platform declaring “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL” (emphasis in original), though climate change is not mentioned elsewhere. There are real debates about how to respond to climate change (a point I will return to), but the current position of the Republican Party is not one that lends itself to serious academic debate.The Democratic party does not have a monopoly on science, but there is a stark contrast in the rhetoric used by Republican and Democratic leaders when it comes to science and higher education. A negative tone towards academia has been building for decades, with Nixon proclaiming in 1972, “the professors are the enemy”—a sentiment reiterated by J.D. Vance in 2021. Data show that 2016 was a major year for shifts in views on higher education among Republicans. In 2015, 54% of Republicans believed colleges and universities had a positive impact on the direction the country was heading, a slight increase from 53% in 2012. But just two years later, in 2017, that number plummeted to 36%. Anti-science rhetoric was only accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. For better or worse, Democrats have framed themselves as the party of science, and Republicans seem to be content with this, opting instead to feed into anti-intellectual populist politics.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of anti-intellectual political platform extends to sociology and to broader issues of academic freedom. Earlier this year, the Trump administration issued an executive order prohibiting schools from teaching about privilege, from suggesting that colorblindness is racist, from using a student’s preferred pronouns, and from teaching that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.” “Fundamentally” may be ambiguous, but the amount of empirical evidence sociologists and social psychologists have accumulated documenting racism, sexism, and discrimination in the United States is vast. The Department of Education, which Republicans from Reagan to Trump have promised to shut down, responded to this executive order with their infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, prompting a lawsuit from the American Sociological Association, which argued that “If implemented, the restrictions in this letter will fundamentally change how sociology is taught and how sociological research is conducted, and it could potentially lead to the shuttering or further shrinking of sociology departments across the United States.” While there should be room to debate research on racism, sexism, discrimination, and other issues, the policy positions that are increasingly being taken by the political right do not foster diversity of intellectual thought or academic debate—they silence it.Eppard and Mackey assert that when it comes to gaining more viewpoint diversity in academia, “it is unlikely that this will be willingly accomplished by the faculty, so it is much likelier instead that senior leadership and trustees will have to take a greater hand in hiring processes and implement some checks and balances to achieve more diversity.” Besides invoking images of loyalty tests to certain political ideologies already being implemented in some educational systems in the United States, this proposal has several problems. Administrators are not subject experts. They are not in a position to evaluate whether someone is qualified to teach sociology, climate science, immunology, or other fields in which they do not hold a PhD. Additionally, the authors’ assertion provides no clear way for administrators to accomplish their goal of increased ideological diversity. Would they ask job applicants to show their voter registration and implement affirmative action plans for Republicans? What about other underrepresented viewpoints in academia? Forty percent of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago. Will administrators ensure that the views of this large group of Americans are equally represented in evolutionary biology departments?
Diversity of opinion is good, and Eppard and Mackey are right to suggest that we need more of it. However, these authors present a narrow, U.S.-centric view of academia, setting up a false dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats. Academia and academic publishing are a global affair. Even just within the United States, twenty-two percent of faculty are foreign-born. Democrats, who represent the left in the United States, would be considered a centrist party in nearly every European country. Even Democrats’ most radical policies for social services pale in comparison to broadly popular policies in Europe around healthcare, education, energy, prison reform, etc. There is a wide ideological field to the left of the American right, with plenty of debate to be had between positions in that space.To illustrate what ideological diversity in academia in this space looks like, I return to environmental sociology and the issue of climate change. Republicans have largely removed themselves from this conversation entirely by denying the existence of climate change. No debate can be held within sociology on how to address climate change if there is no agreement on the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is occurring and being driven by anthropogenic emissions. However, within environmental sociology, there are myriad theories concerning how these social forces drive climate change, as well as many opinions about the proposed solutions to the problem. Ecological modernization theory and the environmental Kuznets curve tend to take more optimistic views of economic growth and technology, suggesting that continued advancement will eventually lead to a reduction in environmental harms. Treadmill of production theory and metabolic rift theory argue that economic growth and our current political economy will continue to drive environmental degradation. Both sides have produced empirical tests of their theories, and the evidence shows a complex picture. These complexities have spawned and connected with additional theories and perspectives to explain the human-environment relationship, including world systems theory, ecologically unequal exchange, degrowth, world society and world polity, environmental justice, risk society, ecological Marxism, and ecofeminism, among others. There are legitimate debates raging within the field and between these perspectives, including arguments in favor of what would be considered conservative positions—for example, the argument that the free market will adapt to meet needs and solve the climate crisis. But again, all of these debates within environmental sociology rely on the shared ideology of science—either accepting the overwhelming evidence and consensus on climate change or challenging it with strong empirical evidence.
Trust is the key theme of Eppard and Mackey’s article. Their assessment that trust in academia is falling is accurate, and some of their final suggestions about increased transparency in academic publishing would certainly improve trust and accountability. However, the authors fail to view this problem through a broad sociological lens, instead taking a narrow U.S.-centric view of the academy. They also fail to adequately explore the political shifts within the United States that alienate the highly educated, as well as the calculated movements designed to sow distrust in academia and science, including movements undermining public trust in climate change, vaccines, and more. Reflecting widely held ideologies back to the public would no doubt raise trust in academia, but this is not our mandate. Rather than reflecting back the public’s ideologies, science must cause the public to reflect on their ideologies.Michael Briscoe is in the Department of Sociology, Criminology, and Anthropology at Colorado State University Pueblo. His research focuses on the intersection of human, animal, and environmental well-being.
