Is it a "problem" that there are so few political "conservatives" in the American academy?

Most contributors to the interesting CHE symposium seem to agree it is, which by my lights is tantamount to admitting that they don't think their academic fields are Wissenschaften.  My essay takes a rather different approach:

That someone is a “conservative” is as relevant to a faculty appointment as the fact that they prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, or rock climbing to chess. Political tastes deserve as much consideration as other personal characteristics when it comes to hiring scholars, which is to say, they deserve none. (Indeed, to consider political tastes at all is illegal at public universities, one of the problems with “diversity” statements.) I’ll return, below, to the possible exceptions to the preceding, but the rule is clear enough.

The Humboldtian ideal of the university, to which we in the U.S. are self-consciously heirs, is one in which the only subjects taught are those that are “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), in the German sense of that term. Scientific fields involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters. In the Humboldtian university of the 19th century — when Germany was the world leader in almost every academic discipline — Wissenschaft included not only the natural sciences, but history, classics, and many other “human” (or social) sciences. Max Weber’s plea for “value neutrality” in the human sciences was made against this background: A scientific method, Weber argued, is not a politically partisan method.

These days there is a tendency, especially in the feebler parts of the academy, to scoff at the Weber/Humboldt ideal, which draws a bright line between science and politics. This is a mistake, even if the relationship between partisan political values and Wissenschaft is more complex than Weber allowed. Political and moral values, for example, can influence the choice of what to study with scientific methods: Should a scholar investigate the role of the capitalist class in Hitler’s seizure of power, or the relationship between race and intelligence? Political and moral values may also affect tolerance for the weakness of supposedly scientific methods (think of the methodological intransigence of neoclassical macroeconomics despite decades of predictive failures)....

Reforming those defective scientific disciplines is difficult, given academic freedom, but it should not be done in terms of parochial and highly context-sensitive "conservative" and "liberal" categories.  As Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia, candidly admits:

Today genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds. Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.

It's true that fascists are underrepresented in the academy.  Is that a problem to be fixed?

I do agree with Gregory Conti, a politics professor at Princeton, who notes that even if there is no discrimination in faculting hiring, faculty are,

an increasingly small corner of the institution and that more or less every other aspect of it — from “Centers for Social Change” to freshman orientation to the student-life bureaucracy to the posters on dorm walls and rec-center boards to the pronouncements of officers of the university, to name just a few — is saturated in that distinctive blend of identitarianism, cultural progressivism, and therapy-speak that has dominated the left and the Democratic Party for the last decade or so.

Objecting to this nonsense is compatible with believing that the aspiration of genuine scholarly disciplines should be to appoint scholars, not do political-party bean-counting.  But the rise of "identitarianism, cultural progressivism, and therapy-speak" has little to do with the political composition of the faculty, and everything to do with the rise of an administrative class, too often trained in education schools, that has exploited statutory demands for equality to impose this bullshit on the university.  The real failure here is on the part of spineless university leadership, who spout DEI blather, and almost never affirm the Humboldtian and Weberian ideals for the university.  Even Robert Zimmer, the former President of the University of Chicago and poster child in the media for "free speech" on campus, was the President who introduced DEI into the fundamental commitments and principles of the university, right up there with the actual purposes of producing and disseminating knowledge in a comunity of free inquiry.  

Finally, I wanted to flag this observation of Musa al-Gharbi (a journalism professor at Stony Brook):

The ideological and cultural leanings of academe are best understood by being mindful that professors are overwhelmingly relatively affluent, urban, and suburban white people who graduated with terminal degrees from the top programs in their fields.

These kinds of folks don’t just dominate the academy. They are the primary producers and consumers of most content produced in the “symbolic professions” (such as journalism and media, advertising and entertainment, design and the arts, science and technology, politics and activism, finance and philanthropy, consulting and administration, religion, law, and so on).

People who share this background tend to vary in dramatic and systematic walthays from most other Americans.

This is surely important.  Of course, there is no reason the Wissenschaften shoudl reflect "most other Americans."

(I want to acknowledge Len Gutkin, the CHE editor, who organized this excellent symposium.)