They Have No Idea What We Think

By Abigail Anthony

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

In the past week or so, there have been some popular threads and insightful discussions on social media about the presence of conservatives and conservatism — or more accurately, lack thereof — in universities. (See here, here, here, and here for a few examples.) Below I have paraphrased responses contributed by (presumably left-wing) individuals defending the state of academia, in no particular order. (A few of these lack hyperlinks as citations, either because the account went private or the post was deleted as I was drafting.)

 

1.      Conservatives oppose education itself, independent of what is being taught at educational institutions or how they lean politically, and therefore do not train enough qualified people.

 

2.      Universities are for literate people, therefore conservatives are excluded.

 

3.      Universities do not directly discriminate against conservatives on the basis of ideology; they simply maintain rigorous intellectual and scholarly standards that conservatives fail to meet.

 

4.      Conservatives necessarily hold conservative beliefs, none of which are intellectually defensible positions, and therefore conservatives are unfit for academia.

 

5.      Conservatives support Trump, so they must be stupid and therefore do not belong in universities.

 

6.      Intelligent people lean to the left, and because academia is for intelligent people, academia leans to the left.

 

7.      Academia leans to the left because reality and truth lean to the left.

 

8.      Universities do have viewpoint diversity by virtue of having different disciplines and specialized schools, therefore the complaints about a lack of viewpoint diversity are unfounded.

 

9.      Conservatives are almost always bad writers and therefore do not meet scholarly standards.

 

10. Conservatives are anti-intellectual and do not believe in the underlying methodologies necessary for producing legitimate scholarship; an example of conservatives rejecting methodology is apparent in their belief that there are two biological sexes.

 

11. Some disciplines are built on left-leaning premises, like how sociology examines power structures such as racism, and conservatives are unwelcome in these fields because they reject the underlying premises.

 

12. There are some conservative professors, ergo there is no discrimination against conservatives in academia.

 

13. There is no discrimination against conservative beliefs in academia because conservatives who refrain from sharing their political beliefs do sometimes get tenure.

 

14. There’s a progressive professor who didn’t get tenure, so it is actually conservatives who are the problem on campus.

 

15. Shutting down some of the violent pro-Palestinian activism on campus that disrupted university operations means conservatives — not progressives — are opposed to free expression, viewpoint diversity, and debate.

 

16. Conservatives don’t even apply for jobs in academia, which has nothing to do with the current political climate on most campuses, so we can’t prove there’s discrimination.

 

17. Conservatives believe they have a right to the prestige associated with university affiliation but do not want to put in the effort to achieve the status of professor; conservatives despise all ideological out-group members and therefore want leftists kicked out of academia.

 

18. There is a left-leaning consensus in the humanities because left-leaning arguments are won by merit in a marketplace of ideas; conservatives want their discredited or rejected views to be considered only on the grounds of fairness.

 

19. Conservatives don’t want to be in academia for reasons wholly unrelated to ideological discrimination. They just want money.

 

20. Conservatives are dogmatic and reflexively reject any counterarguments that undermine their views; they do not want to be intellectually challenged.

 

21. I, a leftist, had to listen to an awful right-wing professor for a whole quarter, therefore right-wing students have to listen to left-wing professors and not complain.

 

22. Welcoming conservative arguments in academic discourse, especially on the premise that the pursuit of truth requires considering a broad range of views, means we open the floodgates to demonstrably false views like “the earth is flat” or pseudo-disciplines and methodologies like “witchcraft.”

 

23. Conservative views are not supported by the academic literature, therefore those views are unsubstantiated by evidence and should not be discussed in academic contexts.

 

24. Conservatives are underqualified for academic positions and want to be hired by affirmative action.

 

25. Conservatives want to be ideological DEI hires, even though they oppose DEI.

 

26. Actually, academia has a ton of conservatives and libertarians.

 

27. A problem with academia is that there are too many conservatives.

 

28. Ideological or political leanings are irrelevant when teaching in a majority of academic disciplines, and most academics are not interested in politics and just care about their scholarship, therefore ideological or political bias is not a large-scale issue.

 

29. We, the progressives, don’t want viewpoint diversity because that would mean hearing from racist, sexist people who want to strip us of rights.

 

So, to summarize: There are too many conservatives in academia, but also conservatives are barely represented on campus so academia leans left, and conservatives need to stop complaining about a perceived ideological bias on campus, but we should maintain the existing left-leaning bias because conservatives are dumb and evil, yet most professors are apolitical and therefore there isn’t a detectable partisanship on campus. Conservatives are discriminated against because their views are immoral or unintellectual, but also there isn’t ideological discrimination because they actually just fail to meet scholarly standards, and conservatives are unwelcome in certain fields because they reject the left-leaning premises of specific disciplines, yet conservatives are the ones who resist intellectual challenges. The ideological imbalance is a figment of the conservative imagination, but also it is real and good.

 

But the most significantly flawed argument is represented perfectly in a handful of posts from different users, which I will quote: “Conservatives are not well represented in academia because conservatism is, for the most part, the ideology of the incurious. Abortion is bad because the Bible said so. Immigrants are bad because Fox News said so. Capitalism is good because Reagan said so.” Another person, when describing pro-life arguments and whether they should be evaluated seriously in academic discussions, said “every single argument is about controlling a woman’s body there’s nothing to discuss with people who want that.” To hire a pro-life ethicist in a gender-studies department would be equivalent to hiring a young-earth creationist in a geology department, another person claimed, because pro-life arguments are built on an “ideology” of “subjugating women.” An assistant professor at the University of Alabama suggested that hiring a geography professor with critical views on immigration is similar to a medical school hiring a pro-cancer doctor or a black studies department hiring white supremacists.

 

That’s exactly the issue with universities today: The people arguing that conservatives are too “incurious” for academia are the same people who have no idea what conservatives believe or why we believe it. In other words, they insist on excluding certain views, philosophies, and ideologies without even vaguely knowing what those are. Ultimately, the left-leaning supporters of academia’s status quo are incapable of presenting conservative views in terms that we would find accurate, fair, and acceptable because they have no idea what we think. Ironically, those same people consider themselves to be admirable proponents of “inclusivity.”

 

But, as an effort to model open discourse and participate in substantive debate with people who disagree with me, I want to pose the following questions:

 

1.      Who are the conservative professors who received tenure in the past 50 years but were unqualified for the position? Are there any progressive professors who similarly received tenure in the past 50 years despite being intellectually unfit?

 

2.      What conservative arguments or positions, if any, should be presented fairly in university contexts for students to consider?

 

3.      Is it ideal if there are zero conservative-identifying faculty and students at any given university?

 

4.      Should a student be able to accurately guess a professor’s political views and preferred policies based solely on what the professor says in class?

 

5.      Should you strive to be able to articulate the views of your opponent on a given topic in terms that your opponent would deem an acceptable characterization?

 

6.      Should the political views of a candidate for hiring or tenure be considered, even if those views have nothing to do with that person’s scholarship?

 

I suspect that I would answer these questions differently from most professors, and that’s because we disagree on what the mission of a university should be and how education should be designed to achieve such an aim.