Several months before the 2024 election, an infographic made the rounds on social media, showing donations to Biden vs. Trump in 2020, broken down by profession. The most pro-Trump profession: homemakers. The most pro-Biden profession: professors. Another study found that at elite colleges, the ratio of Democratic- to Republican-voting faculty was 8.5 to 1, with the ratio only getting larger as the institution becomes more elite. The ratios in certain disciplines are staggering: for instance, 42 to 1 in anthropology. (My discipline, geography, wasn’t included in the study.)
“Academe is a uniquely vulnerable target.”
Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that the Trump White House has universities in its crosshairs. Academe is a uniquely vulnerable target: an ideological enemy camp dependent on state largesse (especially in the form of grant funding, for both public and private institutions) and accordingly subject to federal oversight. This means that academics need to contend with the fact that campuses have become ideological monocultures out of sync with the surrounding political landscape. Self-preservation demands significant reform. By and large, these are reforms we academics should have done anyway, and years ago.
Now, apologists for the monolithic partisan status quo in academia often attribute it to self-selection. Republicans, these apologists say, tend to value commerce more than Democrats do, and are thus a lot likelier to wind up in the commercial sector than in a doctoral program. Democrats, this reasoning also says, are likelier to have non-commercializable values (concerning matters such as art, culture, justice, and the environment). Since academia is a setting where ideas are ostensibly not under constant pressure to be commercially profitable, it would make sense for commerce-averse Democrats to wind up in the academic profession.
Anyone who has interacted with the many intellectually curious right-wing people who spend time online posting about ideas, art, and literature will find such generalizations implausible. And certainly this explanation can’t account for the 42-to-1 partisan imbalance in certain disciplines. Instead, I believe there is a persistent, subtle “screening” that keeps Republican would-be academics out of the professoriate. This screening goes back decades and has excluded not only people who are vaguely MAGA or proto-MAGA, but also other types of people on the right: free-speech libertarians, religious conservatives, and skeptics of the idea of progress.
This assertion is hard to demonstrate empirically, as the screening is decentralized and often unconscious. Bright college seniors with conservative leanings sense that academia won’t be “for them” and mostly don’t bother with that career path in the first place—an inward decision that doesn’t show up in any stats. The young right-wingers who do try out an academic career path, but know to hide their political views, nonetheless come across as “not quite right” when grad-school admissions committees or—if the person somehow gets through to this stage—academic job-search committees look at their profile. The application gets tossed aside or sandbagged with a weak offer, not necessarily for consciously worked-out political reasons. In any case, the reasons hardly ever get written down—a notable exception being certain rubrics used for required diversity statements. But the trends predate such requirements, which are merely symptoms of the deeper “screening” to which I refer, not its main mechanism.
There is a deeper problem with the claim that academia has wound up as a partisan monolith because Republicans care about profitability while Democrats care more about ideas for their own sake. Academia today is hardly a realm of pure, non-instrumental thought. As they have become more monolithically progressive, many disciplines have reconfigured themselves to serve a kind of “epistemic support department” function for the Democratic Party coalition, seeking to produce ideas which will be politically profitable for this coalition, and devaluing other ideas that are not, in a partisan sense, “with the times.” This partisan self-instrumentalization in academia accelerated after Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016.
Partisan self-instrumentalization is little different, really, from becoming a type of salesman. In fact, it amounts to a deeper kind of mental servitude. A salesman sells the quantity of vacuum cleaners he has to in order to meet his quota, and is perhaps intellectually free during the other hours of the day; perhaps the salesman is even free within much of his own mind when he is actively selling the vacuum cleaners. By contrast: is the young academic or graduate student, desperately trying to scrap together a coherent research project that ticks as many intersectional boxes as possible to flatter the composition of the 21st-century Democratic coalition, really “intellectually free” at any hour of the day?
There is also the question of what becomes of those who were screened out, which brings us back to the intellectually curious right-wingers one encounters online. Many of them end up spending much of their time on social media discussing taboo authors like Jünger and Mishima, illiberal interpretations of ancient Greek philosophy, and dissenting accounts of the aftermath of colonial breakup. But they also discuss how to use metapolitics to retake epistemic power. They even do things like collectively think up the “Springfield, Ohio” story, serving in their own way as an “epistemic support department” for the MAGA-era GOP. “This ‘Springfield’ story will shift the election-season focus back to immigration at a metapolitical level, and this dooms Kamala.” (I am paraphrasing somewhat.) I believe these people are important, and that many of them were supposed to be professors. And if they were professors, they’d be supporting the institution and its configuration of commerce-resistant protections, rather than taking a battering ram to it.
“Discourses online about human genetics are entirely dependent upon academia.”
Those with the battering ram want to sack and smash, this is clear—but what do they want to build? Some in MAGA will say that what needs to be overthrown is the very idea of research as a “walled compound” in the first place. Nothing should be protected from commercial market forces—nothing! Such protections, indeed, are the seed of all the corruption and the distortion. “Let the market sort it out.” “Start a Substack, bro.” “Crowdfund it.”
I don’t see how this is viable, if the goal is to get research which breaks through tired old barriers and expands frontiers of knowledge. Take anthropology, among the most conservative-free realms of the academy at the moment. There is no reason this should be the case. Interest in pre- or non-modern ways of life is widespread across the political spectrum, including through much of the new right; for example, consider the online right’s persistent interest in the topic of ethnic conflicts between farmers and pastoralists.
In a scenario in which anthropology were eliminated entirely as a field of scholarly research, the whole enterprise would likely be reduced to a single annual commercial ritual involving two individuals: Graham Hancock going on Joe Rogan once per year to say Atlanteans built the Great Sphinx of Giza (or equivalent Hancockian clickbait pseudo-theses). Listeners tune in; Rogan gets some advertising money; Hancock gets some exposure for his latest book. That’s what would happen in a scenario where the academy’s walls were torn down and nothing new, with new kinds of commerce-resistant walls, were built in its place. Someone with a media reputation would monopolize the purveying of whatever lowest-common-denominator pop version sold well commercially.
We could make a similar point about genetic research. The new discourses online about human genetics are entirely dependent upon academia—on the existence of an institution with certain commerce-resistant walls. The Substacks and X accounts are downstream of the big pathbreaking studies, such as a recent one by the David Reich team at Harvard on the genetic origins of the Indo-Europeans. The people doing these studies are housed in academia and are not constantly having to worry about what ideas are or aren’t commercially attractive.
In short, both sides of the partisan divide should want academia to be preserved as a commerce-resistant space. But each side will likely double down on tendencies that will push things in the opposite direction. Under siege from GOP state legislatures and the Trump White House, progressives may retrench into defending their academic citadels the best they can without reforming the institutional ills that made them a target in the first place. For the right, meanwhile, a “rebuilding” orientation wouldn’t satisfy their animal desire to destroy their enemies and exact revenge for their exclusion.
“It is the mendacious partisan exploiters of tenure who have weakened it.”
Nonetheless, a scheme for how to save academia should be in circulation: something to guide, provoke, and set a conversation into motion—today a very angry conversation; but perhaps not so angry tomorrow. In this spirit, I offer three radical proposals to save academia.
Hire Conservative Professors
In ten years’ time, it should simply no longer be the case that the professoriate is the most monolithically Democratic profession in the United States. The “professors” circle in this graph needs to move downward. If it doesn’t, the battering ram will come, and it will smash all in its path. And the smashers will have a point.This is not to say that some oversight bureaucracy ought to be looking at professors to make sure they’ve been voting the “correct” way. No, it would be up to the disciplines to figure out just how they want to recruit the profile they’ve been screening out for decades. The only reality check would be in the 10-years-later chart of campaign support by profession. In 10 years, third-party researchers into donations to political campaigns will notice a direction in some disciplines towards partisan rebalancing. And in other disciplines they’ll notice no such movement.Academic job candidates will of course be incentivized to lie about their politics, but at a certain point a person’s research profile “cannot lie” about this sort of thing. It would be strange indeed for a history grad student to spend years writing a dissertation challenging standard progressive accounts of colonialism in order to “pretend to be a Republican.”
My proposal here does not require any discipline to hit 50-50 as its goal. There simply need to be enough Republicans on a department faculty that they’re more than a sullen minority always keeping their real thoughts to themselves. The tipping point where they’d be willing to speak up and get their ideas into the mix is probably somewhere around 20 to 30 percent. Of course, a self-confident and vocal minority could be effective in gaining more hiring lines and thereby growing its numbers. This growth could very easily entail the department’s conservative bloc beginning to hire types of conservatives that the liberal-majority faculty had not initially anticipated. Alternatively, members of a department’s shrinking liberal bloc could conceivably try to bring in multiple types of conservatives so that a united conservative bloc would be less likely to emerge.
Would this amount to “DEI for Republicans”? Maybe. But not exactly. DEI as we’ve known it has been a sham type of diversity. That’s because the academy’s mission is supposed to be intellectual, and DEI has not valued intellectual diversity. Instead, it is built entirely around the enshrinement of optical diversity. It is not designed to keep disciplines intellectually honest by creating checks and balances between different schools of thought. By contrast, getting more intellectually oriented conservatives onto faculties could serve that function very well. (If it really is helpful or necessary to say this: I am urging partisan rebalancing as someone who isn’t a Republican and has hardly ever voted for a Republican, and has voted for a great many Democrats.)
Another criticism of partisan balancing in the disciplines would be that it’s quixotic, because deep incentives exist throughout academia, outside of the hiring or admissions gateways, that would successfully incentivize virtually all new hires and admittees eventually to conform with the opinion of the academic majority. This brings me to my second proposal.
Abolish the Grant System
Academic freedom of inquiry is the opposite of the grant system. The two cannot cohabitate the same cosmos. Because academic grants exist, nobody in the academy is really intellectually free. If academics were really intellectually free, then there could not be such a thing as an academic grant.
The grants are the central nodes in the existing research ecosystem. They are anticreative nodes, staffed by anticreative people; or if the people happen to be creative in some other aspect of their lives, they do not wear that hat when they’re on the grant committee. Creative hat comes off, commissar hat goes on. Why should the funding be held at these chokepoints? The funding could be seized and distributed to the researchers. Directly. In the form of increased salary. We should never speak of “funding” again. Only of money.
My proposal, then, is that the grant organizations be abolished, and that professors pay for their research themselves, out of their own pockets—which will be a bit fuller thanks to the seizure and redistribution of grant organizations’ money.
Now, “paying for research” can mean a great many things. Some professors will purchase faster computers; or pay more research subjects to participate in a study; or go visit their favorite research site in Burkina Faso more frequently. Others will be selfish. They’ll use the money to re-pave their driveway or place their kids in private school. And this selfishness is all right. This is part of the proposal.
We need a professoriate in which professors like doing research—and like it selfishly. The “selfish” choice, in this scenario, would really be to fly to Burkina Faso more times per year, and the “personal sacrifice” from their point of view would be listening to the pragmatic spouse who says that, no, a new driveway is needed instead. And that would be a judgment to be worked out internal to the complexities of the professor’s own life—not through a grant committee. This is because some of the time, the kind of professor I have in mind will—selfishly—pay for creative new research rather than pave the family driveway—whereas the grant committee, which is an anticreative node, is designed to fund work that reinforces the premises of the coalitional majority. For, lacking any real willpower or vision of its own, the grant complex has let itself become swept up into a wider political coalition (the liberal coalition), becoming one mechanism among many for shifting resources between the coalition’s members. It thus opts for politically convenient findings over anything that might turn out to be politically inconvenient—that is, over anything new.
In the hard sciences, research is obviously more expensive than new computers and a few extra trips to Burkina Faso. Many scientists need lab equipment running into the tens of millions of dollars or more. But here too, the scientists can simply be paid more, and what’s more they can pool resources with each other to conjure the equipment they think they need in order to do good science. Or maybe they’d re-think what “good science” is in the first place, and that would help break through a great many scientific impasses. At any rate, there’s a monetary size past which it would make sense for a voluntary “pool” among colleagues to be placed in the stock market, and the interest accrual could pay for new experiments. These are the kinds of things that become possible after eliminating the “grant commissar” chokepoint.
But this proposal—abolish the grant system—does require making professors a lot richer. And many outside the academy won’t like this. Not one bit. Some won’t like it for reasons of mere jealousy—set this problem aside for now. Others will have a much more politically valid suspicion of the scheme. And this political suspicion is something addressed, and perhaps resolved, through the next proposal.
Audit Tenure
Many in the public don’t want tenured professors to be richer because they don’t trust professors. Whereas I say above that many professors will “selfishly” put the extra money into good new research ideas, not only do many members of the public instinctively distrust this image of the professoriate, they see many professors as utterly uninterested in research integrity, and as far more interested in scoring partisan points. Furthermore, they perceive professors as being quite mendacious about research, if that’s what it takes to score partisan points.
Now, the existing faculty as a whole is not as bad as this suspicious perception supposes. However, a recent example of academic dishonesty did make me somewhat sympathetic with these suspicions. A University College London criminologist, Ella Cockbain, found in her peer-reviewed 2015 research on the UK grooming-gang scandal that 80 percent of the accused perpetrators in that scandal were Pakistani Britons. Yet when subsequently writing about the same topic in The Guardian in 2020, Cockbain asserted the opposite: that “there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes.” This is an awfully big pivot—one which would be understandable and defensible if Cockbain had acknowledged in some intermediary publication that she thought her old research was wrong, and explained why it was wrong. But Cockbain never offered such an explanation in a public forum; to the contrary, she repeated the 2015 findings in her 2018 academic book. This certainly gives the appearance of someone who spent an earlier segment of a career assessing data honestly enough to allow her to gain academic credibility and clout, and then used that clout to wear the “expert” hat on the pages of The Guardian—where she proceeded to betray what her actual research had showed. (This is assuming my understanding of her published record, formed through review of her 2015-2020 publications listed on Google Scholar, is correct.)
This is a type of deceit which can be tough for the normal academic quality-control mechanisms to catch, because academic peer review only applies to journal publications, not to what a scholar might be saying in the pages of The Guardian or The New York Times, on CNN, and so forth. With that said, Cockbain’s unexplained pivot against her old research has also shown up in recent work by her that is indeed peer-reviewed, so it seems that something in the peer-review process has failed here too.
The example is British, but comparable cases do come up in American academia too. And this category of academic dishonesty is a serious problem for rebuilding public trust in institutions. The academic enterprise has always relied upon an implicit social contract, where the surrounding society provides academia with its resources, leeway and protections only insofar as it supposes that this kind of political weaponization of expertise will not take place.
There needs to be a kind of audit to catch past and future dishonesty like that, and re-associate the institution of academic tenure with the standard of truth. Scholars who use an academic reputation to score partisan points, and misrepresent research findings in the process, have tarnished the brand of tenure, but I do not think it’s too late to clean it up.
There are also a great many other cases of academic dishonesty—people who committed plagiarism, created fake research data to get themselves published, and the like. Such people ought to be subject to a tenure audit and potential loss of tenure as well. And there’s the issue of tenured “dead-wood” professors, who haven’t been productive in many years. In their case, I think it’s best to keep them, since it’s too easy to misconstrue what is actually the slow-burn book project being composed over 20 years in uncharitable terms. But the Cockbain problem is more important than these other issues, which don’t cut deep into the implicit social contract between academia and society.
Some will read this third proposal and suppose I am trying to weaken tenure. Quite the opposite. It is the mendacious partisan exploiters of tenure who have weakened it. I am seeking to make academic tenure into something that those without it can accept the higher rationale for again.
‘DOGE is coming”: This is what I am beginning to tell friends and colleagues who are also tenured or tenure-track academics. If not DOGE itself, then something like it with a different name. What is our defense plan? Mostly, the response I get is the frog in the pot. The flame’s been turned on, and the water is getting warmer, but the temperature increase is slow enough that the frog won’t spring into action to save itself.
There’s also another response I get, at least from a few: “Let’s counterattack.” This is, in certain respects, a nobler sentiment than sitting in the pot, but it is also misguided. In fact, it’s part of what got us into the current mess in the first place. When Trump won the first time, a great many academics decided to reconfigure their disciplines, which had been somewhat intellectually and ideologically autonomous up until that point, into epistemic auxiliaries to the Democratic National Committee—to aid in partisan counterattacks against nascent Trumpism. But these counterattacks all failed in the end. History moves. Today, the question is not how scholarship can better aid the liberal power bloc in the fight against MAGA—nor, for that matter, vice versa. It’s how academia can be ceded its own space with its own ramparts, a space whose autonomy is respected by both of these sparring empires.