By Isaac Schorr
Monday, December 28, 2020
Having developed a mild-to-moderate case of misanthropy
from my own political exploits in college, I was admittedly disinclined to take
the Twittersphere’s word for it that a “new study
shows” that the higher-education system does not push students to the left.
When one of the study’s architects, Professor Logan Strother of Purdue
University, even went so far as to suggest that it disproved the assumption of
“many conservative pundits and politicians” that “college education
‘indoctrinates’ students into liberal or leftist ideologies,” I felt compelled
to at least give it a read. But upon closer examination, my initial suspicions
were confirmed: The methodology and findings of Professor Strother’s study
should do very little to assuage the fears of conservative critics of higher
education.
The study aimed to measure the effect that roommates had
on each others’ political development and the effect of the university in
general on students’ views. This was done by asking freshmen to classify
themselves as “far right,” “conservative,” “middle-of-the-road,” “liberal,” or
“far left” once early in the fall semester and then again in the spring
semester. Results showed slight shifts away from “liberal” and toward
“middle-of-the-road” and “conservative” self-identification. The researchers
then performed a two-tailed t-test that found the rightward shift to be
statistically significant, leading them to the following conclusion:
Our study shows that the ideology
of first-year college students in our sample does not change much over the
course of their first year on campus, contrary to the stated fears of many
high-profile conservative pundits. Moreover, to the extent that there are
aggregate changes, they are generally in the conservative direction. . . .
I wish I could say that the study should alleviate the
“fears of many high-profile conservative pundits.” But it shouldn’t, so I
can’t.
Its most obvious design flaw is that it only measures, or
rather purports to measure, changes in ideology over the course of students’
freshman year. Using the results of such a study to declare that college
doesn’t make students more liberal is like using a three-point lead at the end
of the first quarter of a football game to declare yourself the victor. And in
this context, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how students’
ideologies change over the course of their time in college.
By and large, students don’t become radicals because they
spend their first or second semester being taught introductory sociology or
political science by a far-left professor who inspires them to pretend to have
read and agreed with Marx. It’s more often a gradual process that sees them
become increasingly progressive as they climb the ranks of student
organizations and take on leadership roles. Most freshmen arrive on campus
wanting to think of themselves as open to others’ perspectives, even
conservatives ones. But as they pursue positions in advocacy, pre-professional,
and student-government groups as well as prestigious honor societies, the
incentives shift. It becomes unfashionable to remain friendly with the
Republican from their freshman-year floor. In fact, it is in some cases
demanded by their social circles that they publicly denounce campus
conservatives.
Another glaring issue with the study’s methodology is how
it measures ideology. By asking students what they consider themselves to be
rather than designing a series of basic questions about their political views,
the researchers throw into doubt the validity of their data and the conclusions
they draw from it. Although they claim to be gauging political views, what they
are really gathering is students’ understanding of where they fit on a
continuum of ideologies. Not only does this fail as a measure of their actual positioning relative to the
population, but it is further skewed by the environment they’re in. After
spending eight months taking classes taught by liberal instructors and living
among a disproportionately liberal population, it stands to reason that they
might think of themselves as a bit more conservative, regardless of their
actual beliefs.
Finally, even the researchers admit that since this study
took place during the 2009–2010 school year, its present-day usefulness is limited.
A decade is a lifetime in American politics. When the study was conducted,
President Barack Obama still opposed gay marriage. The emergence of a more
radical sexual politics and the rehabilitation of far-left economic views by
Bernie Sanders had yet to transform our polity, and nowhere has the impact of
those developments been felt more acutely than in the university.
Funnily enough, even granting all those caveats, I would
still agree with the study’s authors that college does not “indoctrinate” most
students. Most students — like most Americans — take only a passing interest in
politics if they take any interest in it at all. I would suspect that while the
average student moves leftward as an undergraduate, to describe this change as
“indoctrination” is to overstate it. But for those students who seek out
positions of relative power on campus and real power in government and
journalism afterward, there is no doubt that the leftward shift experienced in
college is much more dramatic.
The portrait painted by some genuinely concerned conservatives and some cynical ones of all-encompassing leftist indoctrination on campus is misleading. Professors’ bias is a problem, but it is far from the biggest issue with campus political culture. Peer pressure and the resulting incentives for radicalization are the primary cause of a leftward shift in students’ politics over their college careers, and this shift is largely concentrated among the politically interested and “movers and shakers” in campus politics. The straw man of totalized “indoctrination” thus does conservatives a disservice: It gives liberal researchers an excuse to ignore the very real consequences of left-wing campus culture, an excuse they are all too willing to take advantage of.
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