Recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education debate has emerged concerning “intellectual diversity.” This issue was raised in an advertisement by a student group, the Duke Conservative Union, which questioned what they perceived as a “liberal bias” among faculty. Is it the case that academics are more politically liberal than the American population? And if so, why? I think there can be a couple knee-jerk responses to these questions from both the right and the left. For example, some conservatives might suggest that there is some collusion that keeps conservative PhDs from being hired or that some kind of ideological brainwashing takes place either in graduate school or on the job that transforms academics into liberals. Equally absurb would be the leftist statement that getting a Phd requires intelligence, something that is in short supply on the right. A more thoughtful investigation is required. I should say, before going further, that I am not registered with any political party myself and that my “politics” informed by contemporary philosophy would take you a decade of diligent study to understand (as it did for me). That aside, I will move forward beginning with the premise. Another article on the site linked above suggests insightfully that there are many classes where the professors’ politics are not readily apparent or probably much of an issue: science and math classes for example. I would also guess that this alledged “liberal bias” is less perceivable or present in recreation or business or physical education or engineering or architecture or any number of fields. What the DCU is most concerned about are the Humanities and Social Sciences, where politics is more at the forefront. So let me present a few possibilites. One perception of the difference between liberals and conservatives that is out there right now is that conservatives tend to view the world in black and white. Our President and his advisors are great examples of this. Something is right or wrong, true or false. Obviously this is a generalization and is not uniformly true, but then again the claim of liberal bias is also a generalization. Many academic disciplines incorporate this possiblity of falsification, the sciences for example. However, in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we often deal with interpretations that cannot be made black or white, literary interpretation for example. In reading literature we have to live within an intellectual environment where many, even opposing, interpretations are equally “true.” Perhaps working in such an intellectual environment is not desirable to many conservatives. I should point out that the indeterminacy of literature is not a function of liberal politics but rather of the cognitive processes of language: it’s just not possible to say with certainty what words mean. A second explanation is more economical and cultural. Here’s another generalization: conservatives tend to make career choices for the purpose of increasing personal wealth. I believe this only makes sense from a conservative perspective. So if you are a “neocon” faced with the option of getting an MBA and making $100,000 or getting a PhD in literature and earning $40,000 (if you are lucky enough to get a job in a very competitive market), what would you do? On the other hand, I believe that many academics enter the profession for reasons that are more cultural and personal than economic or strictly political. That is, many professors in the humanities do many things differently from the mainstream population. They don’t watch a lot of TV. They are not particularly acquistitive or consumerist. They enjoy writing and reading. For example, here I am reading these articles and writing this post. I don’t get paid for it in any way. I’m doing it because I enjoy it and feel like it. In other words, I think the career of an academic in the humanities is perhaps something that is just not attractive to conservatives. We work hard, but we don’t make a lot of money. We write books that generally do not garner significant royalties simply b/c we enjoy the intellectual experience of researching and writing and b/c we want to contribute to thoughtful dicussion. We are open to the possibilities of a complex world. Humanistic philosophy is not about resolving questions once and for all, but about unfolding complexity and activating the indeterminate. It is certainly not about proving that the left is correct and the right is wrong. Now, given all that, I think you certainly might experience humanities courses as liberal simply in the sense that they do not express the conservative certainty about the world being a particular way. It does often seem in conservative discourse that one is either “on their side” or “wrong” or “unAmerican” or something like that. I suppose if you define everyone who does not agree with you as a “liberal” then you are likely to find a lot of liberalism around, particularly among faculty, who rarely agree with one another. By the same token, we are generally only exposed to a very limited range of politics in the mainstream media. Humanistic courses often present us with intellectual alternatives, questions that cannot be answered simply from that mainstream perspective, and critical methods that demonstrate ideological and material motives behind those perspectives. This may seem to suggest that there is an anti-conservative agenda at work (and I’m sure that with some faculty there is). However, more generally, I think what you are encountering here is the same critical process that is applied through the humanities: a push toward indeterminacy and pluralism.