At a Washington, D.C., forum last month named for Republican president Ronald Reagan, a Wall Street Journal reporter asked panelists what structural change they would make, if they had a magic wand, to increase public trust in higher education and “create American citizens—maybe American patriots.”

Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, said she would do something she doesn’t know how to do in real life: “Create a more politically diverse faculty.”

“Faculty do not work in a day-to-day environment where they really have to tangle with people on the political right,” Storey said. “They don’t necessarily know deeply what people are thinking there.”

Another panelist, Dartmouth College President Sian Leah Beilock—a vocal advocate of “viewpoint diversity” in higher ed—objected. While she wants to ensure Dartmouth has faculty who promote “heterodox ideas and think in different ways,” she said, “I’ve pushed back on this idea that a faculty member’s political affiliation is the right way to assess this.”

Storey rebutted Beilock using an argument a supporter of equity or affirmative action might employ: “We would think it strange if we had universities that were very curious, for example, about what women think, what female authors have written, and we had a 90 percent male faculty. We would think that was a fact worth thinking about. It’s the same thing.”

Beilock concurred, but said she didn’t think looking at political donations—one way researchers have measured faculty political affiliation—is especially helpful. “I also worry that the response to this is affirmative action for conservatives, and I really worry about taking one particular quality and using that to decide who should be part of the faculty,” she said. Faculty should include “voices across the political spectrum,” she added, but “if we use the wrong proxy, we just end up in some of the same situations we ended up in before.”

The debate at the forum was not esoteric or theoretical. While Storey said she doesn’t know how to fix what she sees as a problematic lack of conservatives in higher ed, she and AEI are already trying to address it. They’re partnering with Johns Hopkins University on the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative, which the university explicitly says “aims to encourage conservative, libertarian and heterodox students and graduates to consider a career in higher education, and to support them in their efforts.” AEI and Johns Hopkins have also established a Fellowship Exchange Program, which allows people from both entities to collaborate on research, teaching and other projects.

Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels, who agrees academe has too few conservatives, is supporting further initiatives, including a new School of Government and Policy in D.C. It’s Hopkins’s first new academic division since 2007. The dean, William Howell, told Inside Higher Ed he’s seeking to attract politically diverse students and faculty, including conservatives.

The thinking goes that it’s easier to hire faculty with diverse ideologies at new academic entities rather than try to diversify existing departments. A few selective private universities have established civics-focused centers in recent years, though it’s unclear whether smoother hiring was their goal.

But much of the growth of such centers has taken place at public universities in red states. Storey—whose full title at AEI is the Ravenel Curry Chair in Civic Thought, co-director of the Center for the Future of the American University and a senior fellow in Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies—is an advocate of the civics centers that Republican lawmakers and university governing boards have established on some prominent public university campuses. The structure of some of these centers, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, gave them the power to hire conservative-leaning faculty without vetoes from existing department hiring committees.

Beyond Johns Hopkins, it’s rare to hear universities explicitly say they’re trying to attract more conservatives. Promoting such a goal has its critics; Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said AEI is engaged in “political interference” as part of a “larger effort to push universities in the direction of producing ideas that they prefer.” He said other conservative think tanks are also contributing to “hand-wringing about this manufactured notion of intellectual diversity.” He also said a faculty member’s party registration is a “really bad proxy for what one’s teaching and scholarship looks like.”

“I’m registered Democrat, but I have every critique up and down of that damn party,” said Kamola, who’s also a Trinity College political science professor. “And so I think that this idea that because I’m registered with one party, I think one thing, and that that is the thing that’s going on in my research and teaching, I think is insulting.”

Kamola said people with certain dispositions may be attracted to certain professions, such as animal lovers who become veterinarians.

“They’re using this argument to mischaracterize us and saying that because certain kinds of people are drawn to a profession, then as a whole we are a profession to be skeptical of,” Kamola said. “And therefore them—nonacademics, think tank hacks—have the right to interfere in how our work in higher education takes place.”

‘Liberal’ Faculty and Their Critics

Studies have shown that, over all, faculty at research universities and other four-year institutions lean left. In his book What Happened to College? How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It, Colby College sociology professor Neil Gross wrote that he and other sociologists surveyed faculty at U.S. research universities last fall to understand their views.

Of the respondents—including tenured and tenure-track professors, clinical faculty, and lecturers—21 percent said they had “extremely liberal” social views and another 43 percent said their views were “liberal,” compared to only 6 percent who said their social policy stances were “conservative” or “extremely conservative.” On economic policy, 46 percent of faculty said they had liberal or extremely liberal views, while one in 10 faculty held conservative or extremely conservative views.

Citing other studies, Gross wrote that “academia as a whole is a liberal but certainly not a radically leftist occupation,” adding that faculty have generally moved left historically, but “so have doctors and lawyers.” And he sought to refute common theories as to why faculty lean left.

“Yes, the GOP is bizarrely anti-science right now, but faculty were left leaning even when support for scientific research was bipartisan, as it was in the 1990s,” Gross wrote. He instead said the best overall explanation is “political typing,” in which professors historically came to be associated in the public mind with being liberal, and that impression continues to shape the professoriate.

“If you ask high school students how far they plan to go in their studies, liberals greatly outnumber conservatives among those who will say they’re interested in getting a Ph.D.,” Gross wrote, adding that “it’s a liberal pipeline all the way to the source. Discrimination [against conservatives] may factor in, but it doesn’t explain why professors are liberal, as there aren’t enough conservatives with Ph.D.s from top schools against whom anyone could discriminate” (emphasis in original).

Steven Teles, a professor in Hopkins’s new School of Government and Policy, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative is about countering students’ perceptions that academe will discriminate against them for their views.

“Our objective is to convince heterodox liberal through conservative students that top phd program[s] (or at least many of them) are more open to them than they think,” Teles wrote. “I’ve met a number of young people through this program and the level of discrimination they perceive is often far greater than what I think is actually the case (that’s not to say there isn’t discrimination, but it’s not such that they can’t find a highly resourced program that’s a good fit for what they want to do).”

School of Government and Policy Dean Howell told Inside Higher Ed that “there are a lot of spaces in higher ed that don’t just lean left; it’s that they consist almost exclusively of progressives. And conservatives, a good number of them, feel like these are unwelcome spaces, and they look to go elsewhere. And, oftentimes, elsewhere means leaving the academy entirely.”

Howell is trying to bring to his school “people who are radically underrepresented in higher education—and they certainly include people who are conservative,” he said. His mission coincides with the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative’s, which operates as a university-level initiative.

He’s not trying to “offer safe harbor to people who are not troubled by the Trump presidency,” he said, nor has he “written down a set of rules that say we need X number of Democrats, Y number of Republicans, and will tolerate a certain number of people at the far fringes and some independents.” Instead, he wants to build a “more expansive community” to attend to “big challenges that our country faces,” he said.

“If what you want to do is grapple with hard, complex problems where the diagnosis of the problem itself requires that you be challenged from people who think differently—and that the articulation of any solution requires the building of coalitions of people who sit in different places ideologically—we’ve just got to do this,” he said. “And do this well, and do it unapologetically.”

Defining ‘Conservative’

In these debates, conservative doesn’t necessarily have to mean “politically conservative”—itself an amorphous term in a country where the Republican president, for example, supports tariffs.

Paul Carrese, a professor and director of the Center for American Civics within Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, argues that the civics centers that GOP-controlled legislatures and university governing boards have established aim to restore what can be called academic or intellectually conservative disciplines, such as American political history, military history and diplomatic history. By his count, such centers have opened on 17 public university campuses across a dozen states, starting with ASU a decade ago.

“It may be the case that you would have more political viewpoint diversity on the faculty if you restored this kind of academic, intellectual diversity—important fields and subfields that used to be prominent, used to be studied, and have been cut out, marginalized,” said Carrese, author of Teaching America. “But [political diversity] is not the intention of the academic reform effort in these civic thought and leadership units.”

Howell, too, stressed the importance of attracting scholars from “understudied” areas.

“It’s really critical that we have people who think long and hard not just about social movements—which, for matters involving taste or their prior normative commitments, those scholars tend to lean left—but to also have people who might study military history, or study the founding era, or study the politics of the national debt,” Howell said. “And those people may lean right in terms of their inclination.”

“That has nothing to do with affirmative action of any sort,” he added. “That has to do with trying to figure out what kinds of knowledge matter.”

Kamola, of the AAUP, also brought up academic disciplines, but to rebut the idea that universities are already largely liberal places.

“If you go to the business school, or you go to the law school, or you go to the medical school, you will oftentimes find that those are very, very conservative places, even if the people in them are registered Democrat,” he said. “The way the academy works is a deeply conservative process. It takes very, very long work, and hard work, in order to make ideas shift.”

Kamola said it took decades to successfully make the argument that women’s history matters, for example. That higher ed came to value voices and worldviews beyond those of elite, white males wasn’t “caused by a bunch of out-of-control, rampaging, wackadoodle professors,” he said. He said it’s “the product of really good arguments,” books, research and teaching.

He added that the disciplines conservatives often criticize—including ethnic studies, gender studies and sociology—are underfunded. That they’re “being treated as some sort of hegemonic impulse within the entire university that is dictating how higher education works, it’s laughable and it’s insulting,” he said.

At the Reagan summit, Beilock said her faculty includes a Democratic state House member who teaches government across the political spectrum. Storey said that’s wonderful, as is inviting Republicans to speak on campus, but it’s not enough.

“I think we also need Republican professors who invite Democrats,” she said.