Is Liberal Academia Ruining America, Or Saving It?

Colleges are liberal. But what if that’s not the problem—what if it’s the point? In this episode of American Socrates, we explore why higher education tends to lean left—and why that might be exactly what a free society needs. From the values of critical inquiry and social justice to the historic mission of challenging power, we look at the real reasons academia skews progressive. Is liberal academia ruining America, or saving it? We make the case that a left-leaning academy isn’t a failure of objectivity—it’s a reflection of what education is meant to do: question, rethink, and build a better world.

Kruger & Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000 77(6)

Carney, Jost, Gosling, & Potter (2008), “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind” in Political Psychology.

Jost et al. (2003), “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin Vol. 129 No. 3 339-375

Transcript

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times. Colleges are just liberal indoctrination factories. It's meant as an insult, like an accusation, but I'm not going to argue that colleges are not liberal. I'm going to argue that that is, in fact, what makes them great. Most professors, especially in the humanities, the sciences, and the arts, lean to the left. College campuses are full of people who talk about justice, critique capitalism, question traditions, and aren't afraid to challenge longstanding norms. So let's not dodge that or quiver in shame about it. Let's sink our teeth into it and ask, Why do you think that is? Because the real issue isn't whether colleges lean liberal. The issue is, what kind of work does higher education actually require of us? And what kind of mind is best suited to do that work? Welcome back to American Socrates, I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Let me be blunt here. The values that people associate with political liberalism, like open-mindedness, curiosity, humility, tolerance for uncertainty, those aren't just restricted to the realm of politics. Those are the necessary foundations of higher learning and truth-seeking. If you want to do advanced work in philosophy, or climate science, or literary theory, or ethics, or neurological science, or mathematics, even business, you need to get comfortable with being wrong. You need to sit in rooms where maybe no one agrees with you, but all of them are willing to entertain your ideas. You need to question your own beliefs, not just once, but over and over and over again. And that's hard. It takes a certain kind of character. It's uncomfortable work. It's slow work. It's very vulnerable work. And it takes a kind of courage. Now, I'm not saying that conservative people don't have what it takes to go to college and to get an advanced degree. What I'm saying is that if your brain is wired to seek things like certainty, to avoid certain levels of ambiguity, if you feel threatened by differences in opinions, then you're going to really struggle in a place that requires you to do exactly those things. And that's what a university is supposed to be. It's not a place where everyone's going to agree, but a place where everyone is expected to think for themselves and try to form some kind of consensus. So, yeah, colleges do lean liberal, if not outright leftist, but not because there's some secret agenda or they're indoctrination factories or that they're brainwashing people. They lean liberal because liberal habits of mind, things like openness, pluralism, and intellectual humility, are just better suited for the task of higher learning. In today's episode, we're going to unpack that idea. We're going to talk about why learning demands discomfort, how the Dunning-Kruger effect shows up in, say, political thinking, what neuroscience has to say about open versus closed-minded brains, and why, if you care about the truth, and not just tradition, you should want colleges to lean liberal. This is not about dunking on conservatives. It's about defending the examined life and the kind of mind that can live that life. When I first started at college, I had this idea in my head that the truth was something solid, because, I mean, that's the way it was presented to me in every classroom I'd ever sat in before then. The truth was solid. It was agreed upon. The point of education, as I understood it, was to arrive at the truth, to memorize it, to repeat it with confidence. That's what learning was, just trying to figure out what the truth was; other people knew it, they would give it to you, so on, and so forth. I knew there was an edge to human understanding. You know, there was this boundary, this horizon, and a place where questions that we didn't have answers to yet existed. You know, and I thought somewhat naively that the point of college was to bring us right up to that edge and then say, okay, go extend it. Go find more answers beyond the edge. That's how school had always worked for me. It's how we teach grade school and middle school and even high school today. The textbooks said what the answers were. The teachers affirmed them. The tests rewarded those students who could remember them really well. But then, sometime in my freshman year, something happened that shook that idea right out of me. It was in a geology class that I had. I sat in on a debate between two professors from the geology department. One of them was the professor for the class, and the other one was one of his colleagues who he had invited in. They were both respected and clearly very intelligent people. And they were really going back and forth around the evidence of climate change. This is in the early 2000s, when the climate change debate was really just starting to heat up. I don't remember even what the arguments were, or even who won, in my estimation. But I do remember being stunned. All that grabbed me was the fact that they were arguing. There was no settled understanding here. There was no agreed-upon opinion. There was no clean edge of human knowledge that you could clip one's toes around and look out beyond. This wasn't clean. It was really messy. It was uncertain, cloudy, foamy, and full of tension. There were no good answers here, and it made me feel unsettled as a person. It wasn't a tidy bit of knowledge. It was a glimpse at the limits of understanding. And I had a kind of minor existential crisis in that moment. If the professors didn't all agree on what the truth was, if truth wasn't in fact uniform, if education wasn't about arriving at the answers, then what the hell was it? What was I actually doing here? I struggled so hard as a result of that insight that my grades actually dropped for a couple of semesters. The moment stuck with me. It unsettled me from my very comfortable illusion. But more than anything, it invited me into something better. Because what I realized is that college isn't about collecting facts and being very comfortable in your certainty of those facts. It's a way of learning how to live with unanswered and perhaps even unanswerable questions. It's about staying with tension, even learning to thrive in it, to swim in this tension, not just living with ambiguity in a painful sort sort of way, but learning to enjoy and dive deep down into it and developing the kind of mind that can hold competing ideas, to to test them out, to revise what you is you believe, and then just keep going. And that's not easy. It's not comfortable. And it sure as hell isn't politically neutral. The work of higher learning, real learning, demands humility, familiarity with uncertainty, and openness, a reliance on others who differ, and I mean, really and deeply differ with you. It takes a tolerance, then, for other people's weirdnesses, their eccentricities, their otherness. So, in a word, it takes liberality. It takes a freedom that is uncomfortable. And those traits just happen to be the traits that we associate with the political left. So when we say things like colleges are liberal, maybe what we really mean to say here is that colleges are doing the kind of work that doesn't reward certainty and fear, but brave curiosity. So, yeah, that feels pretty threatening, but it's not indoctrination. It's an initiation into a way of thinking that doesn't need to be right to be honest. As for myself, you know, I struggled with the academy for years. I was happy to leave, and at some point, I never wanted to go back. But the funny thing is, is as I continued to learn and grow on my own, I ended up working my way back into academia. But this time, my eyes were much more widely open. I could see both its faults and its triumphs. I knew how to use the institution and its practices to gain the knowledges that I needed or wanted. And now I know the place really well for the first time and perhaps a little better than even people who had a really wonderful and easy experience going through college, because they never got into those nooks and crannies. So I guess at a short way of putting this is, I started college with a much more conservative mindset. I was afraid of uncertainty. And college did change that. But I would say that that was a positive thing. That was not me being indoctrinated to believe a certain set of ideas. That was me becoming comfortable with uncertainty. That was me being able to be brave, where other people have to cling to the ideas that they need. And so that's what we're going to be talking about here. One of the best parts of teaching philosophy, especially to first-generation college students, is getting to witness that same moment that I had, the light bulb moment when they realize, wait, wait, wait, wait, the goal of arguing isn't to win? And I get to say something to him. I like, yeah, exactly. In philosophy, you don't try to win. You want to learn. And that means hoping to be challenged out of the beliefs that you have, hoping to change, hoping to see things differently, hoping someone can teach you something you didn't already know. The best ideas then can come from anywhere, which is why a diversity of thought and experience is it't some political agenda. It's essential to deep thinking. You need those points of view. You need DEI. Anyone who's trying to get rid of DEI in higher education doesn't know how higher education works. I know, yeah, that sounds liberal, but it's not because I'm pushing a certain set of beliefs. That's what, you know, a church does. They have a certain set of dogma that they want to insist people use. What I'm doing is to help people question those beliefs that they already have, to think critically, and not just parrot what they've already been told. That's what real education does. It trains you to challenge your own assumptions. If you're not doing that, you're just not doing philosophy at all. You're defending dogma. And so you need these other people to help with that process. You cannot do it on your own. You can't just sit there and not believe what you already believe. You need someone else to challenge your ideas, which is why DEI is extremely helpful. And for students from backgrounds where being wrong means they get shamed or even worse. It's a radical shift in who they are. I grew up in that world, too, at least to a small extent, where being wrong just isn't safe. So the freedom to explore, then, to be unsure, can be really scary, even feel like you're doing something wrong or sinful. But then that's the point. Real education doesn't reward confidence. It rewards curiosity and humility. It asks you to let go of your certainty, to admit that your worldview might rest on kind of shaky ground. That could be uncomfortable, but it is the foundation of liberal education, not partisan liberal, but freedom-oriented liberal, Education that liberates the mind from fear and rigidity and authority. And that free thinking has always scared authoritarians. Authoritarian thinking does not like tough questions, but authoritarianism prefers compliance. It prefers certainty. It likes easy answers that don't need to be defended. They just need to be obeyed. But liberal education asks questions like, well, what if I'm wrong here? Why? What if all of this is simply wrong? What's the strongest version of the other side? What evidence should change my mind if I'm being indifferent and undecided? Those aren't signs of weakness. They're signals of intellectual growth and intellectual honesty. And to those raised in cultures of certainty that growth growth feels really, really scary, even threatening. They mistake it for indoctrination because they think that all teaching is about obedience. They think that all teaching, then, is a form of indoctrination. And so they see independent thinkers coming to a consensus as somehow a lack of freedom. Like they've just indoctrinated everybody to this point. It's exactly the same sort of forced opinion that's really all they themselves have ever known, but it's not the same thing. It's about academic freedom, not to believe whatever you want, but to believe responsibly, because you've thought, you've doubted, you've tested, and you've chosen this for yourself. So, no, I'm not indoctrinating my students into Marxism, let's say. I'm helping them to realize that they might not have all the answers just because someone who they very much loved told them that these were the right answers. And when they do that, when they step into that discomfort, you know, mommy was wrong. Daddy was wrong. Your pastor was wrong. Your grade school teacher was wrong. Your high school teacher was wrong. Your other professor was wrong. When you can live in that discomfort and realize that doesn't make them a bad person, just because they didn't know something they thought they did, they don't just become better students. They become better thinkers. They become better citizens, better employees, better human beings. So I've talked a little bit here about how college feels from the inside, how real learning requires discomfort, doubt, and a willingness to be wrong. But it's not just this feeling. There's actual science behind this. Let's start with something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is one of those ideas that, once you hear it, you see it everywhere. It's really old. Like, the idea of it goes back to Socrates. But back in 1999, two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Krueger, ran a series of studies that found something a little scary that people who know the least about a subject are often the most confident in their opinions about it. For those of you in academia, there's a negative correlation between how confident you are and how much you actually know and understand about the subject. So the more you think you know, the less you probably do. And the less you think you know, the more you probably do. To make this point more concrete, let's take an example like a test. If you think you know a subject really well, then you're not going to bother to study because you don't really think you need to. You're pretty cool. confident. But if you're less confident, then you do study hard, because you're not sure. So the kids who study ultimately do better on the test, and correspondingly, they know more and understand better. This effect has been recognized, like I said, as far back as Socrates. It's the whole point of Socratic wisdom. I'm smarter than you, because I know that I know nothing, but you, my foolish friend, are walking around talking as if you knew everything, when in reality, you don't know anything at all. So why does this happen? Well, because people don't know enough to realize how much they're missing. They don't even know what it is they don't know. They're ignorant of the very depths of their ignorance. And so believing the pool is rather shallow, they stroll confidently out into the water. And the opposite is also true here, that the people who know the most do tend to underestimate their own abilities, their own knowledge base, because they're aware of just how vast and complex the subject really can be. Part of being enlightened is not knowing that you're enlightened, not realizing how smart you really are.. So that's kind of the first big clue. Real intelligence begins with a certain sense of humility. You can find the study; I'll list it in the show's notes. Sociologists have also studied how personality traits influence political beliefs. And over and over, they found that people who identify as liberal tend to score higher on what's called openness to experience. That's one of the big five personality traits, and it includes things like tolerance for ambiguity, interest in novelty, imagination, and intellectual curiosity. All things that you're going to want in a college student or in a scientist, or a doctor, or an artist, or a philosopher, liberals are filled with this sense of wonder, to quote Carney here and others, in general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and the novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventionalional, and better organized. Conservatives, then, by contrast, are more likely to be driven by fear and anxiety. Compare liberals to another pattern researchers have found, this time, in people who score high on the right-wing authoritarianism scale. These folks tend to value obedience, they value traditionalism, and they value social social conformity. And the research shows that they're more likely to need cognitive closure. They tend to feel threatened by complexity. They prefer a kind of black and white thinking, where things are very simple. And they struggle then with uncertainty. In short, what they need is clean answers from a reliable source, an authority, and they tend to lash out at anybody who questions those answers. To be clear, this doesn't mean that conservative people are dumb. There's nothing wrong with their minds or their intellects. It doesn't mean that they can't learn, that they don't ask questions. But it does mean that in some ways, their thinking is more rigid. It's more anxious, it's more certainty seeking. They are less capable, or should I say, they are less compatible with the open-ended, collaborative, and unpredictable process that philosophy and science and much of higher education have used for millennia now to pursue the truth. That's not an insult. It's just a fact. I was more conservative at one point, and I had to emotionally grow out of it in order to get to where I am intellectually today. Learning isn't about being right. It's about being ready to question, to listen, to revise, and people who are too afraid to be wrong, too afraid of change, too committed to what it is they already believe, they're going to struggle. Not because college is hostile to their politics, as they repeatedly express, but because college requires something that they may not be ready or even able to give.. And that is a sense of openness. So, yes, that kind of openness is more common among people with liberal values, not because they're better people, but because they're more psychologically aligned with what the pursuit of knowledge actually demands. So if you're wondering why universities lean liberal, part of the answer is very simple, because education is hard and not everyone's brains want to do it. But now you're probably thinking, okay, sure, colleges attract open-minded people, but don't they still try to indoctrinate students into left-wing ideas? You know, I hear that a lot, too. And it's not just from politicians or YouTube influencers. I've had family members of students ask point-blank, Aren't you just turning your students into little progressives? Let me tell you something. I'm not here to convert you. I'm here to confront you with what I believe to be the best ideas humanity is yet to come up with. And the best art arguments against them as well. And if you can't defend your worldview in that arena, that's not my problem. That's just a sign that your beliefs need a lot of work. I don't even consider myself a liberal. I'm a leftist. And the difference matters. I'm not trying to make my students agree with me. I'm trying to get them to see a larger perspective than the red and blue or liberal and conservative or Democrat and Republican binary. That is way too narrow to encompass the complexity of politics and is itself a conservative description. In fact, I hope they don't accept my views. I hope they argue back. That's not just better for them. It's better for me. What I am trying to do is teach them how to think, how to examine their own assumptions, test them, and revise them, if necessary. But I also want them to see how a philosopher invites loss. I have, on occasion, been shown to be wrong by my students in my class. It happens, and it's a good thing. I don't get embarrassed. It's not a problem. I didn't get exposed as a fraud. because I never claimed to know it all. When students see how that's done, they know how to emulate a philosophical life, and that is the only one worth living. That's doesn't mean memorizing philosophical jargon or having clever opinions or being the smartest guy in the room, it means living with courage, both intellectually and morally. It means being willing to be wrong, publicly, repeatedly, for the sake of growing. And if I've learned anything in academia, it's this: college is not about giving you the answers. It's about modeling the kind of person who's willing to ask hard questions. That's what most professors do when they're doing it right. We live with tension. We revise our views. We ask questions that our own research might not answer. And that's not ideology. That's not indoctrination. That's just life. When people say college is too liberal or too woke or something like that, what they often mean is that college made me feel uncomfortable. Or college didn't tell me that my own beliefs were already right. Or college didn't confirm for me the way I see things. College forced me to see people, systems, and histories that I didn't want to have to even think about. And they burst my happy little bubble. But if you think education is about affirming your beliefs and not testing them, then you're not looking for a university. You're looking for a church. And again, there is a place for that for people. There's a value in tradition and ritual and inherited belief. It's just not for thinkers. The university has a different job, and that's to train people how to live and examine life. Not just once, but over and over and over again. And, yes, that whole system is going to lean liberal. All right, so what if colleges are too liberal, and conservatives get their wish, and campuses are reformed to become more balanced, patriotic, and aligned with traditional values? Not just a little more moderate, but I mean, like truly more conservative here. Then everything should be rooted in tradition, that everything should be differential to authority, protective of existing power structures, whether they're religious, national, or economic. What would that actually look like? Well, in this vision, American history is righteous. Slavery, if it gets mentioned at all, is thought of as a necessary evil. White supremacy? Well, that's just a liberal invention meant to shame people. Religion, well, that should be protected from critique. Philosophy departments should avoid subjects like feminism, queer theory, or critical race theory as too divisive. Truth would flow down from God and tradition, not up through evidence and investigation. And things like capitalism would just be off limits. There's no teaching Marx or Dubois or Graber, no critical study of wealth and equality or colonialism or labor history. Why? Because in conservative universities, money is going to be sacred. And donors don't want to be discomforted. Already, billionaires fund business schools and fossil fuel companies, bankrupt, climate research, and right-wing think tanks sponsor economic liberty centers that teach students that regulation is tyranny and that unions are somehow un-American. Classes would be vetted, then, for patriotism, Professors punished for dissent. Science would become this singular view of official right answers and then a host of taboo alternatives. Evolution would be eliminated. Philosophy would have to align with Christian and Western nationalist values, or it would perish. The goal then wouldn't be truth, but obedience and conformity. The reason conservatives see universities as biased is because they assume that that is how they work, that their ideology, conservative ideology, just isn't getting its turn in the sun. And hence, it's unfair. But if the conservative model wins, we lose. We lose the ability to ask hard questions. What if capitalism isn't just flawed but unjust? What if national heroes were war criminals? What if your religion is wrong about gender? What if growth and tradition aren't always good? We lose that inquiry. We lose that courage. We lose the one place meant to step outside society and ask, what are we really doing here? A conservative college isn't a university. It's a cathedral, It's certainty. Whether from scripture or from a corporate mission statement, it doesn't matter. It just defends the way things are, not imagining what they could be, and that's not education. That's PR for power. It's not learning, it's loyalty testing. Education that doesn't question power isn't education. It's public relations for authoritarians. So when people say we need to get liberalism out of universities, they're not asking for moral freedom here. They're asking for comforting answers, for obedience, for tradition, preserved in amber, protected from critique. But the world doesn't need more obedience. It needs more people who were willing to challenge it, with evidence, with reason, and with moral imagination. That's why colleges do lean liberal because truth isn't always popular, and justice doesn't always pay six figures. If we take that spirit away, if we turn campuses into places where certain questions can't be asked, certain authorities can't be questioned, then we haven't balanced the university. We buried it. So let me leave you with this. Not everyone is ready for the examined life. That's okay. They want certainty, they want simplicity, they want safety. That's fine. But just because those people cannot handle that kind of complexity and uncertainty, doesn't mean that it's biased. It's the beginning of thinking for yourself to turn away from that. That's what happened to me when I encountered my geology professors debating. College at its best doesn't give you a worldview. It gives you the tools to build your own worldview. And the courage to build something different from what the people in your life told you it should look like. It doesn't pour the truth into your ear. It invites you to look for it critically, with your eyes open. And yeah, that means colleges will always be liberal, not because they're trying to brainwash people, but because they're built on values that liberal- minded people need curiosity, dialogue, pluralism, and intellectual risk. So if you want to walk into a space already certain, already afraid to be challenged, you're going to feel like an outsider in college. But if you walk in with your mind open, your ego put aside, and a willingness to be changed, you won't just get smarter, you'll get freer. Because liberal education, in the best sense of the word, isn't about turning you into a Democrat. I'm not a Democrat. It's about turning you into a thinker. And if that's indoctrination, then maybe that's the kind of indoctrination we need more of. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit American Socrates.buzzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.