Universities Can Appease the Right: It’s time to get serious about ideological balance on campus. Here’s how.
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
April 30, 2025
Universities are currently experiencing a full-blown assault from the federal government and from red-state politicians. Tired of subsidizing universities as a hotbed of ideological activism, Republican leaders are cutting budgets, forcing reorganizations, asserting control of university governance, and taking control of the general-education curriculum at state universities.
Republicans have generally been more skeptical of generous funding of public education, including at the postsecondary level, but this is different. According to Gallup, 56 percent of Republicans in 2015 had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. In 2024, only 20 percent of Republicans did, and 50 percent had “very little” or no confidence in higher education. In that time, support for higher education has also dropped among independents (from 48 percent to 35 percent) and even Democrats (from 68 percent to 56 percent).
There are multiple reasons for the loss of confidence in higher education, but the most common is that universities have become too politicized.
There are multiple reasons for the loss of confidence in higher education, but the most common reason given in the Gallup poll was that universities have become too politicized. Given the ideological bent of university faculty and administrators, this politicization is almost always in favor of leftist causes. This makes Republican legislators, governors, and the current White House administration question why they should use tax dollars to subsidize their political enemies.
Universities have brought this crisis of confidence—and the attendant reductions in funding and independence—on themselves.
Quite frankly, universities have brought this crisis of confidence—and the attendant reductions in funding and independence—on themselves. For the past generation, universities have become not just more politically left-wing but actively hostile to the Right and even centrist thought.
The professoriate at American universities has long had a leftist ideological slant. When asked to self-identify, almost half of faculty in 2016-17, 48.3 percent, said they were liberal, and 11.6 percent said they were “far left,” while only 11.7 percent said they were conservative, and 0.4 percent said they were “far right.” These self-reported data underestimate the percentage of leftist faculty at universities. Many people eschew the extremist labels of “far-left” and “far-right” even when the label applies.
Studies of professors’ behavior show a much stronger leftist bent. One study of professors’ public tweets found that 69.1 percent of professors were “far left” or “left,” while only 15.4 percent were “moderate,” and only 13.4 percent were “conservative” or “far right.” Even this study overstates the number of moderates and undercounts leftists: The average professor in the study (who would be labeled as “moderate”) is almost one full point (on a five-point scale) to the left of the general population. This means that the average professor on Twitter at the time was more liberal than approximately 80 percent of the general population. These are the “moderates” of academia.
Professors are not the only people who work at universities, and broadening our horizons to all employees working in higher education confirms the ideological imbalance. Voter registrations of people who work at educational institutions reveal that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by two-to-one. However, the most lopsided data come from political donations. In the 2024 election cycle, 93 percent of donations from employees in higher education were given to Democratic candidates.
Of course, such an ideological monoculture will have an impact on the scholarship that universities produce, and it would be naïve to think otherwise. It is easy to get a scholarly paper published if it flatters left-wing politics and social views. The grievance-studies hoax proved this most vividly, but the problem is not limited to the “studies” fields. It is possible to build a career in the social sciences using shoddy methods if the results support left-wing assumptions.
For example, “stereotype-threat” theory claimed that lower performance by some groups on academic and cognitive tests was caused by negative stereotypes about these groups influencing the testing situation. This was a darling idea in social psychology for nearly 30 years, but evidence is growing that stereotype threat is an artifact of bad research practices. Large-scale attempts to replicate stereotype threat in females on math tests have failed, and skepticism is growing about the reality of the phenomenon in racial minorities.
Yet, for a generation, psychology professors touted stereotype threat as a demonstration of how a racist and sexist society operated, to the disadvantage of women and minorities. Because the message matched leftist social and political views, the idea rose to a greater prominence than it would have attained otherwise.
Basic academic standards go by the wayside when the Left’s sacred ideals are at stake.
It is not just methodology that suffers under the academic monoculture. Basic academic standards go by the wayside when the Left’s sacred ideals are at stake. This is seen most clearly in diversity “scholarship,” which is so rife with plagiarism that the accusations have almost become routine. In criminology, Florida State University professor Eric Stewart was fired for publishing “false results” due to his “extreme negligence and incompetence” in his two decades of research. Cynics will not be surprised that Stewart’s work invariably showed that bias resulted in blacks being treated more harshly in the criminal-justice system.
In contrast, it is impossible to imagine a low-quality study that supports conservative talking points reaching prominence.
It is incredibly easy to find bad research that flatters the leftist worldview, much of which led to widespread acclaim for its authors. In contrast, it is impossible to imagine a low-quality study that supports conservative talking points reaching prominence—let alone people being able to build a career in academia on such research. Ironically, this means that the research that does support right-wing ideals often is methodologically stronger than average.
In an earlier era, concerns about ideological imbalance at universities focused on how it created scholarly blind spots, led to self-censorship, and damaged the intellectual climate. Those things are bad, but they were not an existential threat to universities.
The situation is very different now. Republican politicians see very little collateral damage to their side if they attack universities. And there is little universities can do because they often have no one who can speak conservatives’ language to defend university funding. Universities also often lack politically connected insiders who can push back against funding cuts in red states or the Trump administration.
You don’t need a PhD to see the problem. With most universities relying on state and federal funds, it was a bad idea to alienate the members of one major political party. This was foreseeable. Indeed, it was foreseen—by a lot of people. Rutgers psychologist Lee Jussim has compiled a list of over 100 books, scholarly papers, op-eds, and other sources in which authors sounded warnings about the dangers of politicizing academia. He even calls the compilation “We Tried to Warn You.”
So now—belatedly—there is a recognized need for more ideological balance in universities. Fundamentally, the shortage of right-wingers at universities can be understood as a problem of a high left-to-right ratio among faculty. There are two general ways to fix the problem: hire more conservatives or reduce the number of liberals. Either method will reduce ideological imbalance, and both working together will be more effective than either operating alone.
If the imbalance could correct itself, it would have done so by now. But there is no sign that this is happening. Therefore, those with decisionmaking power—university presidents, trustees, administrators, deans, and others—need to take matters into their own hands and remove hiring from the purview of the faculty. Here are some practical actions reformers can take that will reduce the ideological slant on campus.
The easiest way to reduce the ideological imbalance at universities is to selectively lay off untenured faculty. These should not be indiscriminate firings; rather, untenured faculty should be evaluated first and eliminated using objective criteria that indicate that they contribute to ideological imbalance. One characteristic of ideological new faculty is whether they were hired under plans or programs that reduced the competitiveness of the hiring process. In the wake of the George Floyd riots, for example, many universities started practices, such as cluster hiring and fellow-to-faculty pipelines, that almost always resulted in the hiring of left-wing radicals and activists. These faculty contracts should be discontinued and the professors invited to reapply for their positions under new criteria that open the process to all applicants. University leaders need to act quickly, though. The first faculty hired under these programs are up for tenure as early as this year.
The easiest way to reduce the ideological imbalance at universities is to selectively lay off untenured faculty.
Pre-tenured faculty who were required to submit a diversity statement should be subjected to the same procedure. These statements—which were opposed by a majority of faculty in a 2024 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—function as ideological litmus tests. They filter out moderates and conservatives and probably do more to contribute to ideological imbalance than any other policy.
Academic departments and programs that are the most ideologically imbalanced need to be reduced in size or dissolved completely.
Second, academic departments and programs that are the most ideologically imbalanced need to be reduced in size or dissolved completely. Everyone knows which departments these are: race and gender studies, humanities, sociology, and anthropology. Some of this reduction can come from natural attrition from retirements and other departures. Other reductions can occur by discontinuing pre-tenured faculty contracts.
At many universities, tenured faculty can be laid off and entire programs dissolved when a university is in a fiscal emergency. This provision gives decisionmakers a powerful opportunity that they can seize. University reformers can apply Rahm Emanuel’s insight that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” When the budget cuts come—and, at some universities, they already have—reformers can take advantage of the crisis and prioritize eliminating or slimming down the faculty headcount in ideologically captured departments. Many of these majors are declining in popularity, and enrollment numbers may not justify current headcounts anyway.
Cutting the number of liberal faculty is comparatively easy. Increasing the number of conservatives is difficult. But it is possible, and reformers have the tools to do so. Indeed, the Left created these tools and has used them for decades. It is not unseemly for the Right to wield them when they have the power to do so.
The first tool is to establish scholarly centers that are staffed with experts in an area. There are hundreds of university centers for the intellectual study of cherished ideas on the left, like social change, climate change, and gender and sexuality. Universities serious about ideological balance should take stock of these centers and create an equivalent number of conservative centers with equal levels of staffing and funding. Universities could create centers dedicated to the advancement of marriage, the study of the canon of Western literature, the exploration of human intelligence, the reversal of falling birthrates, military history, and other intellectually mature ideas that are attractive to conservatives and moderates. Staffing them with qualified scholars would create a community that would be healthy enough to resist the ideological monoculture at many universities.
Creating a center is a great way to attract groups of scholars, but reformers can also target individuals. Universities have a long history of using the “direct-hire” process to identify specific scholars who bring desired expertise and ideas to universities. There is no reason why established, prominent conservatives and moderates cannot be “poached” from their current universities to improve the viewpoint diversity at left-wing campuses.
But, if universities are so infested with liberals, where will these conservative professors come from? The data show that they are out there. In FIRE’s faculty survey of 55 universities, the three most politically balanced were the University of Texas, Dallas (34-percent liberal, 36-percent conservative); Brigham Young University (39-percent liberal, 41-percent conservative); and the University of Arkansas (51-percent liberal, 35-percent conservative). This gives a hint of where the conservative academics are found in large numbers: public universities in red states and religious universities. Some of these faculty can be lured away if they are incentivized and valued for bringing their perspective to a liberal campus.
Some conservative faculty can be lured away if they are incentivized and valued for bringing their perspective to a liberal campus.
Even at universities with some political balance, many of these people fly “under the radar” to protect their careers, or they may simply think that their political beliefs are irrelevant for their teaching and scholarship. The social sciences have a method of identifying these people anyway: snowball sampling. The theory behind snowball sampling is that “birds of a feather flock together,” even in hidden groups. Just as smokers are more likely to know other smokers and illegal immigrants are more likely to know other illegal immigrants, conservative and moderate academics are more likely to know other scholars who belong to their political tribe. Administrators can identify known conservative or moderate scholars and ask for recommendations for other conservative or moderate scholars who are worthy targets of direct hiring.
Universities should also stop rewarding activism—which is almost always left-wing.
Establishing centers and engaging in direct hires are explicit processes to alter the ideological balance of a university. But other implicit reforms would make universities more welcoming to conservatives. Eliminating diversity statements in hiring and promotion is essential, and more universities are discontinuing this requirement.
Universities should also stop rewarding activism—which is almost always left-wing. Hiring-and-tenure criteria should explicitly state that political and social activism will neither help nor hinder a candidate’s evaluation. Universities should also stop paying for professors’ memberships in professional organizations that take official political stances and cease paying for travel to these organizations’ conferences. Volunteering for these organizations should also not count towards faculty members’ career advancement. This will encourage faculty of all political persuasions to focus on their research, teaching, and non-activist service.
Universities should also establish content-neutral standards for the research that gets rewarded. Across disciplines, activist research has certain characteristics in common: using a “framework” in which data and facts are forced to fit an ideology, prioritizing identity over the content of ideas, and creating an immunization to falsification. Administrators, trustees, and other leaders are fully within their rights to veto hiring or tenure decisions if a scholar’s research fits these characteristics. It is not necessary to have extensive training to see that papers on “feminist glaciology” or research that uses “autoethnography” to pass off anecdotes and personal experience as data are not substantial contributors to knowledge.
In contrast, universities should reward data-based contributions to the creation and dissemination of knowledge in faculty members’ fields. In the sciences, this will be research that subjects theories to serious falsification tests and uses data to come to conclusions. This is the dominant paradigm in the sciences, and it will not be hard to reinforce it at universities. In the humanities, universities should reward scholarship that uses primary sources and relevant context to reach new understandings. For example, Australian professor David McInnis is a Shakespeare scholar who has used textual fragments, historical records, and literary allusions to lost plays to gain new insights into the theatrical tastes and practices of Shakespeare’s era. This work has created new understandings of Shakespeare’s work and is far more valuable than a thousand papers that use the Procrustean bed of literary theory to torture a new interpretation out of a text.
Faculty job announcements are another area in need of reform. Many job listings specify a narrow range of expertise that will permit an applicant to be considered. Often, this takes the form of leftist buzzwords, such as “intersectionality,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity.” But a more subtle form of ideological conformity occurs in ads that seek expertise in specific subfields. For example, one colleague’s psychology department is already dominated by social psychologists, and yet most of the department’s job ads request applicants in social psychology. This is a problem because this subfield is more dominated (85-percent or more) by liberals than most areas of psychology. Unless there is a specific curricular need that must be filled, job listings should be as broad as possible so that applicants with as many viewpoints as possible should feel welcomed to apply. Additionally, job listings for faculty positions should explicitly state that the university welcomes heterodox viewpoints as long as the applicant’s conclusions are grounded in evidence and accepted methodologies.
None of these recommendations infringes on academic freedom or mandates a dominant ideology on campus.
Note that none of these recommendations infringes on academic freedom or mandates a dominant ideology on campus. They also do not punish professors for having or expressing political beliefs. These recommendations also respect tenure and due process. Exact practices will vary across universities, but efforts to remedy ideological balance must protect all views. Ideological balance requires respecting disagreeing viewpoints—not suppressing them.
It is also important to state what reforms should not be considered to bring ideological diversity to universities. Quotas and ideologically based affirmative action for conservatives and moderates are a non-starter. Being a “diversity hire” has become a scarlet letter for female and minority faculty members, and no conservative will want to risk getting labeled with that epithet. Quotas and affirmative action are verboten to conservatives anyway. As a group, they are much more comfortable with discrepancies in group outcomes, and there is unlikely to be any large-scale agitation for the professoriate to perfectly reflect the political makeup of the country.
Change comes slowly, especially at universities, which have never fully shed their medieval heritage. But they must start tempering their ideological imbalance if they want to avoid the worst attacks from Republicans. Universities have a choice: either reform themselves or let politically hostile politicians do the reforming without faculty input. When that is the choice, having a few conservatives in the faculty lounge suddenly seems like small price to pay for avoiding the attacks and interference that some universities are already experiencing.
Russell T. Warne is a former associate professor of psychology in the Department of Behavioral Science at Utah Valley University.
Universities Can Appease the Right — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
