Many right-of-center students (especially those who are grade-obsessed) fear that their professors will punish them for their political and cultural views if they were to express them in class discussions or assignments – and choose to self-censor instead.
It’s easy to understand why they are concerned: there is a significant lack of ideological diversity among the professoriate; in social research fields, the left-to-right ratio is roughly 10:1. Professors rarely assign readings by conservative or libertarian intellectuals on the syllabus, let alone engaging with these thinkers in a charitable way. Faculty regularly make off-topic jabs at Trump or the Republicans, or even end up diverging into full-on rants. Even professors who are moderate and charitable in the classroom often put out highly political public-facing essays and social media posts — and regularly demonstrate clear antipathy towards Republicans and conservatives therein. And all of this is amplified, and often distorted, by an outrage-driven media industry.
But do liberal faculty actually demonstrate bias in grading?
A recent study examined the backgrounds, affiliations, and institutional perceptions of more than 7,200 undergraduate students at colleges nationwide found that liberal students do tend to have closer relationships with faculty than conservative students (commensurate with previous research). Moreover, there was a gap between the grades assigned to liberal students as opposed to conservative ones – a difference that persisted even after controlling for things like race, gender, socioeconomic status and SAT scores. However, the gap was very small: less than one-tenth of a point on a 4-point scale (i.e. less than the difference between a 3.0 and 3.1 GPA). That is, professors may be slightly biased in grading, but they do not seem to be severely punishing or rewarding undergraduates on the basis of their political leanings.
This may be a surprising finding – not the least because there iscompelling evidence that professors and administrators do engage in ideological discrimination with respect to PhD admissions, peer review, institutional review boards, faculty hiring and promotion, etc. So what’s up with grading? Is the issue that we just haven’t been measuring grading bias well enough? Perhaps accusations of bias overblown across the board? Or is there reason to suspect that faculty are actually less likely to ideologically discriminate against undergraduates than other groups?
It’s likely the latter. Let me explain:
The first thing people should understand is that most instructors do not enjoy grading – and we really hate haggling with students about the grades we assign (let alone with the parents or administrators they often drag into disputes). Nor do we want to get docked on our teaching evaluations by kids who turned in mediocre work but are mad they got a “C.”
Instructors also understand that the vast majority of students are just passing through higher ed institutions on their way to something else. Undergraduates overwhelmingly identify getting a better job and earning more money as their primary motivations for attending college. Most students who obtain a bachelor’s degree stop there; just over a third of those who complete a BA go on to get an advanced degree. Even most who complete graduate or professional degrees (especially MA, JD, MDs) leave the academy thereafter.
Faculty are not interested in standing in their way. Quite the opposite: many inflate grades, bend over backwards to provide accommodations, and have lowered their workloads and standards in order to allow these students to flow through their classes and out into the world with minimal friction. Put another way, instructors often try to avoid giving students the (lower) scores they actually deserve — let alone giving students grades below what they deserve simply because they disagree with them on a political matter.
Also, faculty don’t take disagreements with undergraduates particularly seriously to begin with. It is easy (perhaps too easy?) for us to write off differences in perspectives as products of students’ relative youth, inexperience, ignorance, unexamined beliefs, etc. We often simply assume that if these young people hadread all that we’ve read, and thought about these issues as long as we have, they would no longer hold the views they do – that their positions would be closer to our own.
The situation is very different with respect to PhD students and faculty. Their identities and worldviews are much more fully-formed than those of undergrads. They are much more sophisticated in their thinking and possess a much deeper knowledge base. Consequently, it is much more difficult to simply dismiss their views. They have read many of the books and studies one would be inclined to throw at them — perhaps more recently than oneself — and can often point out errors, limitations and counterevidence (including, potentially, with respect to one’s own work).
PhD students and faculty are not nearly as transient as undergrads either. If admitted, PhD candidates will be around the department for at least 5 years – and work much more closely with faculty than an undergrad typically would. Many will become colleagues in the discipline thereafter. If hired as an assistant professor, a candidate will be around at least six-to-seven years as they work through the tenure track. Once they obtain tenure, they can stick around indefinitely. In other words, disputes with PhD students and faculty tend to be much more challenging to refute or ignore — and can be more persistent — than disagreements with undergraduates.
They can also be far more consequential:
PhD students and (especially) faculty can affect the trajectory of the field through their research. They can change how others’ work is perceived by either challenging or reinforcing published findings. Professors can attract, cultivate, and mentor students to move the department – and the field — even further in their preferred direction. These efforts can have important positive or negative effects on the credibility and impact of one’s own research – which can affect one’s ability to recruit students, win grants, publish subsequent research in top journals, etc.
In short, there is a lot at stake in the event of deep disagreements with PhD students or (especially) peers — and faculty react accordingly. Hence, most ideological discrimination by professors is carried out against other faculty (in peer review, institutional review boards, as well as hiring and promotion decisions). Some is carried out against PhD students (i.e. future faculty) through admissions committees. However, with respect to undergrads, instructors have very little reason to discriminate in grading – and plenty of incentives not to.
Put another way, ideological bias within the academy is a real problem. It undermines the quality and impact of research and teaching. It needs to be addressed. However, grading is probably not a major way in which this bias expresses itself. This leaves us with something like a ‘good news sandwich’ for students whose backgrounds and ideologies diverge from those of the dominant group:
The first bit of good news is that undergraduate students are probably not being penalized much (or at all) by their professors for holding or expressing views that diverge from the professors’ own.
The bad news is that if these students did decide to persist in academia after their BA, they likely would face more substantial discrimination in PhD admissions, on the job market, in tenure committees, when submitting research for IRB approval or peer review, etc. The self-censoring may never end: many faculty conceal their conservative or religious leanings — and avoid work on controversial topics — in order to preserve good relations with their left-leaning colleagues, avoid being targeted by student activists, and to otherwise protect their professional standing. This is unfortunate — not the least because it suppresses some of the benefits their students and colleagues could otherwise receive from scholars holding divergent priors and commitments.
However, the final bit of good news is that, despite these challenges, those conservatives who do stick with academia all the way to a professorship generally feel good about their career decisions and tend to enjoy their work about as much as their left-leaning peers. Hence, rather than being discouraged and perhaps exiting the academy for thinktanks and the like, conservative and religious scholars should commit themselves to being part of the solution, to staying ‘in’ the system, and to playing a constructive role in reforming institutions of higher learning. We’ll all be better off for it.