Last week’s forum in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Professoriate’s Politics Problem” is a must read. It poses the question that has been getting much attention of late: “Conservatives are rare in academia. Does it matter?”
The responses from several well-regarded conservatives in academia did not disappoint. To note just a few, Zena Hitz (St. John’s College) powerfully exhorts: “Restore core curricula, in which every student reads and every faculty member teaches. Great books are the best territory I know for open-ended inquiry into serious questions. For a university that looks and thinks like humanity, nothing beats a foundation in the human questions and humane conversation.” Ruth R. Wisse, a Harvard emerita, considers the effect of banning ROTC programs at Harvard on the liberalization of the campus. Columbia’s Roosevelt Montás reminds that campuses are “prone to extremes.” Baylor professor Elizabeth Corey remarks that she has flourished as a conservative in her institution.
And yet, the forum included largely faculty from research institutions (University of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, Baylor, and two from Harvard) and top tier liberal arts colleges (Bates, St. John’s). I think the problem looks a bit different at lower-tier teaching-intensive institutions–and my focus here is on secular state universities.
In summer 2023, I walked away from my position as tenured full professor of history at a teaching-intensive state university in Georgia, hardly a liberal state. In fact, with the appointment of Sonny Perdue as Chancellor of the University System of Georgia on April 1, 2022 (not an April Fool’s joke), you would think that state universities in Georgia are now a haven for conservative scholars.
You would be wrong. Yes, progressive faculty in Georgia and other states complain about their perceived lack of academic freedom in the classroom, on campus, and in their published work. Just see this recent AAUP survey of faculty in the South for illustration. Progressive faculty feel pressure, fear, and all kinds of other stressful emotions. But the thing is, conservative faculty, like me (I’m pretty sure I was the most conservative member of my fairly large department), feel those same pressures and fears too. There were concrete moments in my work when I realized that there were expectations added to the job that were incompatible with my values.
One could say that either the liberal or the conservative faculty who report hostility are being excessively dramatic here, but I think there is something more interesting and alarming going on. Yes, in some institutions, there is a documented hostility to conservative faculty. At others, there is a likewise documented hostility to liberal faculty. But there is a third way too, when it comes to certain state universities, and this last one is the most exhausting of all.
Rather than talking about secular academia’s hostility to conservatives or liberals, it may be more productive to talk more about secular academia’s hostility to professors—you know, those people who do all the teaching (and keep seeing their teaching loads go up), and who get so many directives and regulations dumped on them from on high by administrators at all levels, often with no justification or advance notice. Just a taste to illustrate.
My former institution’s president, upon arriving on campus in spring 2020, promptly reorganized colleges and departments with the ostensible goal of saving money: Combining smaller departments and colleges into larger ones allowed to reduce the number of department chairs, deans, and department support staff. Okay, sure. But he did not consult the faculty. The reorganization was simply announced as fiat via an all-faculty email. New departments were created without any rhyme or reason. Some chairs who had previously done an okay job with a smaller department proved incapable of administering a new department of 50+ faculty. Some chairs had no idea how to evaluate faculty now under their purview but who hailed from completely different disciplines. (The president then proceeded to bloat the upper administrative ranks to astounding proportions. Jokes abounded on campus how every time a bell rings, a new administrator just got his wings. So much for balancing that budget)
The disruptions from that massive reorganization continued for years, resulting in faculty departures. Student enrollment tanked next, resulting in faculty layoffs. And while enrollment is finally on the upswing now, it is nowhere close to where it was before this disaster. Oh, and then the president did another reorg this summer. Really. At least the newest one makes more sense, from what I’ve heard.
There was more, much more. At one beginning-of-school welcome-back speech to the faculty, the president also proposed the idea (which he thankfully didn’t have time to implement, and now he and his great ideas have just departed for greener pastures) of taking away all faculty offices, and implementing a new “motel” model of office use on campus: A faculty member who needs an office could simply “check in” at the time they need, reserve a room for meeting students, and leave when done. How lovely. Except, how would my students ever know where to find me on any given day, I wondered? And where would I keep any reference books, should I need to consult a text while talking with a student?
When the humanities building on campus was temporarily closed for renovations, faculty had to move offices from there across campus without any assistance. This included making faculty haul their own concert hall grand piano. In their new temporary digs, they found that campus Wi-Fi didn’t work.
Anthropology faculty were perhaps the worst off: they found themselves hot desking, when the president decided to bulldoze their building one day and summarily reallocated them to a basement nearby.
Finally (and this was my final straw, leading to my letter of resignation), the provost requested that faculty teaching sections of the same course have a common syllabus to be approved by him. Prior to that, every professor teaching World History surveys, for instance, had his/her own syllabus, selected different texts, and had common learning outcomes, satisfying our accrediting body just fine. This was not enough for the provost, a STEM person who was sure that everything in the universe is standardizable. As a colleague remarked, “the provost will just provost.”
I learned later that this policy ultimately didn’t come to pass in this precise form, but the damage was done. Another wave of faculty departures followed.
I could keep going, but you likely get the idea. So let me pose a question here: Faced with policies like these, does it seem like campus climate was hostile to conservatives or liberals?