Inside Higher Ed: ‘The Knowledge-Politics Problem’
In the ongoing debates over professors’ politics, right-wing critics make much of the fact that many surveys have found professors — especially in the humanities — to be well to the left of the American public. This political incongruence is frequently used as a jumping off point to suggest that professors are indoctrinating students with leftist ideas.
Neil Gross, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, is one of the leading researchers on faculty politics, and he recently finished a new analysis of these issues (to appear in a forthcoming collection of essays by different scholars) finding that the conservative critics are correct about humanities’ professors leanings, but incorrect about their views of what classroom responsibility entails.