Gabriel Rossman How to Get More Conservatives in Academia Universities’ ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological
Academia skews sharply leftward and is increasingly illiberal. Many academics have abandoned the fact/value distinction, which had long served as both a source of rigor and a sort of epistemological Peace of Westphalia. That trend is worsening, as graduate students are much likelier than faculty to support suppression of heterodox ideas. The academy’s ideological imbalance has made it easier for younger academics to define themselves around polemical, “praxis-oriented” scholar-activism.
The politicization of the university is not only an obstacle for the Right but for academia itself. Schools’ “sectarian” reputation undermines trust among those who (more or less correctly) perceive them to be hostile to their views. More important, academia’s ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem, as it gives license to theory-laden interpretations of reality and declining rigor. For instance, a 2023 article in JAMA Surgery asserted that “structural racism” may cause mass-shooting events, even though the paper’s analysis showed that plausible structural-racism measures had no effect beyond that of race itself. Likewise, a celebrated 2020 article in PNAS showed that black babies in Florida died less often under the care of black doctors—but as a 2024 replication by Manhattan Institute scholars demonstrated, that effect obtained only because the original authors had failed to control for birth weight, a variable so obvious that its omission must be considered a failure of peer review. Such a left-wing bias—and the errors that it enables—should embarrass the academy.
It also should prompt conservatives to address their human-capital problem: without right-wing academics, there are fewer experts to conduct research and staff bureaucracies. The problem is easy to see. Proposing a workable solution is much harder.
When a fire breaks out in the kitchen, the first step in stopping its spread is to turn off the stove. Likewise, a key part of the solution to the Right’s lack of representation in universities is to identify the source of the Left’s capture of the academy and put a stop to it. Manhattan Institute fellow John Sailer has thoroughly discussed the problems created by DEI statements and “cluster hires” and how trustees and state legislatures can end these anti-intellectual practices. These policies, which require applicants to profess their commitment to an ideologically oriented mission as a condition of employment, certainly contribute to the demand side of the Right’s academic-employment problem.
Conservatives also face a labor-supply issue. As Steve Teles noted in National Affairs, universities’ ideological orientation is mostly driven by self-selection, presumably because both right- and left-wing young people see academia as a proper career only for progressives. I’ve witnessed the trend firsthand by serving on my department’s Ph.D. admissions committee and reading the stack of applications, usually overtly leftist.
One way to improve schools’ ideological balance, then, will be to get young conservatives to take an interest in a research-oriented career. Properly conceived, this goal goes together with providing young people with the research experiences and skills that will make them stand out in Ph.D. admissions, which have become incredibly competitive over the last generation. Ideally, students would develop such skills under the supervision of sympathetic role models.
Whatever their virtues in molding lifelong party activists, the Right’s current programs for developing a human-capital pipeline are poorly designed for attracting conservatives to academia and then placing them in the fields where they can do the most good. Academia already is saturated with 22-year-olds who have spent a summer in D.C. reading Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, and The Federalist Papers. To a slightly lesser extent, the same is true of students with an undergraduate background in “Great Books.” The summer fellows and Great Books students may be intelligent, but they are well prepared only for a few small niches within the arts and sciences: political philosophy and classics, which are shrinking along with the rest of the humanities. So for the sake of both the Right and academia, conservatives need to shift their human-capital efforts from people who know, say, Strauss’s thoughts on thymos, and toward those who know how to do a logistic regression with fixed effects.
On the margin, both the opportunity and the necessity for getting conservatives into academia lie in the social sciences. Unlike the humanities, the social sciences still hold a stable share of academia. And social sciences address policy-relevant questions such as “How does inequality work?” “What are the likely consequences of drug legalization?” and many others. These are questions that benefit from technical expertise and mastery of the academic literature that universities provide. Conversely, scholarly inquiry into these questions benefits from ideologically diverse perspectives to avoid the problem of hegemonic leftist epistemological standards, which is how you arrive at disgraces like the JAMA Surgery and PNAS articles making it through peer review.
Assuming the need for a conservative pipeline into universities, the question is how to achieve it. Admissions to social-science Ph.D. programs are now so competitive that having already created original research is table stakes. Ideally, students will do serious methodologically oriented original research at their undergraduate school as a senior thesis; but these days, a successful applicant to a social-science doctoral program will usually have either a master’s degree or a “pre-doc.”
Traditionally, a social-science master’s degree was just a milestone within a Ph.D. program; but over the last generation, it has become common for students to receive an M.A. in social science in a tuition-supported program and then apply to a Ph.D. program. These master’s programs actively market themselves as a way to build a résumé for Ph.D. admissions. The two biggest programs are at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, but many other schools have created them. The programs tend to involve one year of course work and a master’s thesis. The content is similar to what Ph.D. programs cover in their first two years but is accelerated to work on a one-year basis.
Less common than an M.A. on the résumés of Ph.D. applicants, “pre-docs” are growing rapidly in popularity and tend to make impressive contributions to Ph.D. application résumés. Much as a postdoc is a one- or two-year job doing research after earning a Ph.D., a pre-doc is a one-to-three-year paid internship doing research between undergraduate and Ph.D. Typically, a pre-doc will have worked with a university or think-tank scholar, Federal Reserve bank staff, or other researchers, and coauthored a few research reports or journal articles. Both M.A.s and pre-docs give practical experience in conducting research and producing a writing sample that Ph.D. admissions committees can use as evidence of the candidate’s talent and skills.
What’s needed is a practical plan of action to promote a human-capital pipeline of conservatives into academia. A philanthropist could support M.A. tuition for conservative students or pre-doc salaries at conservative think tanks. I am convinced that supporting young people at the stage between college and a Ph.D. program is a more effective way to promote a human-capital pipeline for the Right into academia than targeting support later on. Providing Ph.D. fellowships would be superfluous; top doctoral programs already give fellowship support for the first five to six years of their programs. Faculty endowed chairs are expensive, have a pipeline problem, and attract pushback from incumbent faculty on (occasionally sincere) grounds of faculty self-governance. Money permitting, both the M.A. and pre-doc approaches are worth experimenting with, on the order of four M.A. fellowships and two pre-docs a year, to start. I’d allow the fellowships to be used at many schools but start the pre-docs at a single think tank—and then, if it works, scale up by adding a second.
The M.A. and pre-doc fellowship models each have pros and cons. The main challenge with M.A. fellowships is ensuring that applicants are genuinely right-leaning without requiring polemically right-wing theses that could hinder admission to Ph.D. programs. However, M.A. fellowships avoid the need for new training infrastructure, as they simply fund existing research training programs. The advantage of pre-doc positions at right-leaning think tanks is self-selection—only candidates aligned with institutions like the Manhattan Institute or AEI would apply. A drawback, though, is that supervising research assistants requires substantial effort, limiting scalability. This issue could be alleviated by using standardized courseware for essential skills, such as data science. A hybrid approach might fund pre-docs under centrist and conservative social scientists at universities via a faculty affiliate network, where university faculty handle mentorship, while a think tank or an NGO provides funding and matchmaking support.
Of course, it’s possible that the self-selection of conservatives out of the universities is rational and that any who try to enter academia and do rigorous research in good faith will still find themselves rejected by admissions committees that see research politicized to the left as desirable or tolerable—but that see research even hinting rightward as anathema. That is, it could be that academia is already so far gone that a few years’ research experience at a conservative think tank, no matter how rigorous, would be more stigma than credential. In this worst-case scenario, schools would suffer by rebuffing the sanity check offered by a modicum of ideological balance—but the junior scholars and the Right will both still benefit. A pre-doc or an M.A. rejected from a Ph.D. program will not go into academia but will still have developed skills that he can take with him into think tanks, government, or industry, and thereby mitigate the expertise gap that the Right currently suffers.
Ideally, we can do our part to restore the balance and rigor of incumbent universities; if they reject this, it is still a worthy goal to build up our own institutions.
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