Angela Erickson - Is higher education becoming an ideological echo chamber?

A new study suggests political diversity among faculty donors at major universities is shrinking, while many conservative professors say they feel uncomfortable expressing their views on campus. Is higher education fostering open debate or becoming increasingly one-sided?

Angela Erickson is Vice President of Research at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. She joins the show to discuss new data on faculty political donations, ideological diversity in higher education, and whether concerns about viewpoint discrimination are affecting academic freedom and open inquiry on college campuses.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Lars Larson show. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails now. The last time that I actually sat in a college classroom was about a half a century ago. And if you wonder, well, did you actually finish and get a degree? No, I did not. I didn't stick around because, well, the liberalism could have taken hold if I'd stayed too long. But these days, I mean, these days, American college campuses are so very liberal, and conservative thought is so very absent it makes the colleges of 50 years ago sound uh, well, but very quaint by comparison. So, conservative professors are almost extinct. The ones that are actually left on campus are afraid to speak for fear of losing their gigs. Is your child's tuition funding a one-party echo chamber? I thought we'd talk about that with Angela Erickson, who is vice president of research at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Angela, welcome to the program. And how bad is the problem? Well, thank you, Lars. So we just conducted a study, commission of study, in which we look specifically at campaign contributions by faculty. So these are your politically active faculty, not everybody. And what we found is that there's been a narrowing band among these folks, so much so that they look more like Bernie Sanders and AOC, the majority of faculty who give to political campaigns. Now, those are your politically active faculty. There are plenty of faculty who do not fit that mark who could be anywhere else on the spectrum. But this is not surprising. We've seen this through other measures as well, that faculty have become more and more um less leaning over time. What we're more concerned about is what this means for students and the education they're receiving. It might not mean anything for a physics student who is going into a physics class and not uh interacting with these uh political ideas. But for someone in a government department or in a political science department, if they're unable to interact with anyone on the other side of the spectrum, they're not getting the full understanding of the views and ideas that are being discussed in government and in policy. Well, and in fact, even I mean, it's one thing if if a college professor wants to be uh personally, you know, on one side or the other, I guess that's okay in theory, as long as that professor is equally willing to listen to, say, uh, uh, a an essay or a paper that was written by a conservative student versus a liberal student. But I I keep hearing stories from parents and grandparents who say my kids on a college campus are scared to death to actually give a even a hint of how they think uh politically if they're conservative, because they're afraid their professor will immediately give them bad grades. Yeah, we see this in our student survey data where students are censoring in their homework assignments professors. But we even see this with faculty on both sides, both liberal and conservative faculty are afraid to speak up, um, more so on the one side. So 47% of conservative faculty uh often uh feel unable to voice their opinions compared to 20% on the liberal side. Um, but it's it's become increasingly a problem. So to give you an idea, in we ran a survey in 2024 where we found that 35% of faculty self-censor their writing to avoid controversy. This would include like academic writing, then whether or not we're finding out the truth. That number in 1954, this was the height of McCarthyism, that number was 9%. Four times more professors are afraid today than they were in the McCarthy area. And it's across the entire ideological spectrum. Well, and I'm talking to Angela Erickson, who's uh with FIRE, that's the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Do the colleges or the boards of trustees that run them, do they see this as a problem? Increasingly so. There are definitely good actors out there that are trying to improve the situation on their campuses, and we see campuses that are doing a good job. We every year we rank colleges on their free speech environment. It's called the college free speech rankings, and we look at uh the student responses to whether or not those students self-censor, if they think the administration's gonna protect their speech. We look at student codes and whether or not they censor potential speech. And then we also look at school policies and whether or not um they've adopted institutional neutrality per se, which is to say they're not taking a stance on something that is unrelated to their mission. Uh and then we also look at actual speech controversies on campus, so whether or not they're deplatforming potential uh graduation speakers, right? So we're looking at what is going on on campus, and there are good campuses, and what we find on those good campuses is they protect free speech, they protect academic freedom. They've adopted things like a Chicago statement, um, they've taken an institutional neutral stance on positions that are unrelated to their mission, and they're they're doing it consistently, and their students see it and they feel more heard and are less likely to censor. I guess what I wonder about is you would think that even among the academics, they would say if we're all coming from one point of view, then where's the alternate point of view? Because at least when it comes to science, uh science is supposed to be about testable uh results and provable results. And and if everybody simply said, you're right, uh the uh the sun revolves around the earth, we'd still be stuck on that point from so long ago, except that we know that's not true. And you say, How could we have been that dumb? Because anybody who strayed from the the narrative was immediately punished, which is what it sounds like is happening today. Yeah, any good academic is going out and seeking people who disagree with them, definitely. And so it's interesting to see this narrowing band of ideology on campuses because it's it brings into question whether it impacts the conversations they're having in the faculty lunchroom. Uh, maybe the conversations that they're having at their association meetings, and I'm not in those, but it'd be interesting to find out more and continue to dig in whether or not it's actually constricting, and we see this in our survey data, but whether it's constricting the uh acceptable viewpoints that can be shared even in academic literature. Well, and it also seems to be hitting the colleges at a time when a lot of people are coming to the conclusion that having $100,000 in debt and a college diploma is not actually going to get you anywhere. In fact, you're coming, you're you're entering into your work life uh as somebody with a boat anchor tied around their neck and a piece of paper that isn't worth much. And and then and then the colleges on top compound that by saying, Oh, and by the way, uh the only point of view you got was liberal. And when you go out in the real world, you're likely to hear both. Yeah, and this is a question we've we've been tracking trust in higher education, and it has been plummeting across uh the nation in terms of how the general public feel about it. And this is something that colleges are grappling with right now, and trustees are grappling with. What is it that we're what's the value we're providing, ensuring that they're providing that value, and parents and prospective students have to deal with that too. Like, what is it that we that that we want to get out of this education and finding the place to do that? Angela, it's always a pleasure. That's Angela Erickson. She is the vice president of research at FIRED, which is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Angela, think and expression, I should say. Angela, thanks very much. I appreciate the time. Glad to be with you and always glad to take your calls at 866, hey Lars. That's 866-439-5277. Send your emails to talk at LarsLarson.com. You know, I mentioned that the U.S. Supreme Court is going to decide on the transgender role in women's sports. Well, guess what? We've got a great example. When a trans goes out and takes part in a women's cycling championship, well, usually victories are counted in seconds. In this case, we're talking about more than half an hour. I'll get you details in just a moment.