Supporters of the "Academic Bill of Rights" make three claims: that partisan politics affect faculty hiring, promotion and tenure; that liberal professors prevent the full exploration of ideas on campus and discriminate against conservatives; and that ideology plays a role in grading and in the
kinds of discussions permitted in classrooms. None of these claims is based on serious evidence.
Take the claim that politics is a factor in faculty hiring decisions. It rests on a study that shows college teachers are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. But party affiliation says nothing about the way teachers teach. More important, it has nothing to do with scholarship and with what counts as a conservative or radical approach to teaching.
Hiring decisions have everything to do with scholarship, and here the tendency is toward pluralism. For example, English departments not only offer traditional courses on Shakespeare, the Victorians, the Romantics, novels, poetry, American literature and so forth, they also provide courses on such theoretical approaches as new criticism, formalism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and feminist criticism.
At some schools there are more formalists than new critics, or more literary historians than theorists. But that reflects English departments' marketing decisions, not their politics. At universities where English departments are predominantly poststructuralist, you'll find history departments emphasizing facts and chronological periods, political science faculties without a political theorist and economics departments that don't teach economic history (as they used to do).
In short, at most universities and colleges you'll find no prevailing ideology across departments but a mix of approaches. If you survey departments over time, you'll see changes that reflect new knowledge in disciplines as well as new styles of thinking. This history, and the mix it produces, has more do with markets than with ideology.
On the questions of whether campus environments are open and students are free to express themselves, inquiry after inquiry has shown that there is no problem. Most recently, the Republican chairman of a Pennsylvania legislative committee looking into these issues conceded as much to a reporter.
But proponents of the Academic Bill of Rights reason backward, contending that if "balance" or "neutrality" don't prevail in every classroom, students are denied their rights. They also insist that students' opinions must be counted as valid -- even if they are wrong.
