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The Purely Imaginary ‘Rightward Transformation’ in Higher Education
One of the most peculiar claims to gain currency in higher education holds that academia has become captive to nefarious monied interests on the political right. Writings in this genre almost always hail from scholars on the left, and attribute a variety of problems in the academy—both real and imagined—to the ulterior-motived influence of conservative and libertarian donors.
Claims of this sort range from abstract allegations of a sweeping but ill-defined “neoliberal” takeover of the university system to elaborate conspiracy theorizing about specific disliked scholars and donors a la Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains.
Common to each telling, an external force of “right wing” ideas are surreptitiously implanted into an academy that previously operated without the taint of these corrupting influences and money. The solution to higher ed’s woes may thus be found in identifying and purging the philanthropic intrusion—in “UnKoching” the campus, in discrediting “neoliberal economics,” and in attributing the achievements of associated academics not to the quality of their scholarly insights but to the purported advantages that clandestine rightwing funding provided them.
This provides a convenient way of attacking and dismissing free market thought, conservatism, libertarianism, or any other disliked ideology without engaging their arguments.
The latest example of this genre comes in the form of a bizarre report by historian David A. Walsh for the Urban Institute, purporting to trace a rightward “transformation” in American intellectual life due to the influence of conservative and libertarian donors.
Using a series of case studies about conservative foundations and donors, Walsh alleges that funding from the right effected a sweeping shift toward free-market, deregulatory, and anti-government ideology within the university system. Conservative donors, he contends, “normalized right-wing politics in the academy to an extent conservatives could have barely imagined in the 1960s.”
While Walsh’s study provides basic historical synopses of several major funders and groups on the right—the Olin Foundation, the Walgreen Foundation, the Koch brothers, and the Federalist Society among them—he conflates their very existence on campus in any form for evidence of the alleged rightward shift in university life. Nowhere does he attempt to measure or substantiate the claimed influence of conservative philanthropic giving, let alone compare it to a suitable control such as the much larger network of donors and foundations on the left.
Mere allegations, tied to a short list of disliked donors and foundations, suffices to sustain Walsh’s causal claim about the rightward “transformation” of academia.
There’s a good reason for Walsh’s lack of measurable evidence for the alleged transformation: Academia did in fact undergo a measurable ideological shift in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but it played out exactly opposite the assertions found in Walsh’s report, the broader “neoliberal takeover” literature, and similar contributions to this genre. All empirical measures show an academy that is moving sharply and rapidly to the political left.
The clearest measure of this leftward shift may be seen in faculty political identification over time. If conservative philanthropy actually exerted transformative power over the academy, we could reasonably expect to see a measurable increase in the number of faculty who self-identify on the political right. Instead, the opposite has happened.
University faculty have always leaned to the left of the general public, although from the 1960s until the late 1990s self-identified left-liberals consistently made up a stable plurality of about 40 to 45 percent. A sharp leftward shift began around 2000, and left-liberals currently make up an astounding 60 percent of all university faculty.
Faculty growth on the political left comes at the direct expense of conservatives, who dropped from 22 percent of the academy as recently as 1995 to only 12 percent today. Furthermore, faculty who identify as “far left”—a category that usually includes Marxists, socialists, and derivative ideologies in Critical Theory—provided the main impetus of this shift. Far leftists more than doubled in number during this same period, going from a small minority of only 4 percent to 12 percent today—or parity with the total number of conservatives of any stripe.
If any rightward “transformation” of academia happened in this period, as Walsh’s analysis contends, it was so thoroughly subsumed by a larger and simultaneous leftward faculty shift that it does not even register in the data.
A more careful proponent of the rightward transformation thesis might respond at this point that faculty ideology alone does not fully capture the effects of conservative influence on campus. Rather, market ideology or “neoliberalism” has taken root in university administration, due to right-wing philanthropy filling in the gaps from public budgetary cuts, or so the theory goes.
Jason Brennan and I investigated this thesis in our book Cracks in the Ivory Tower by asking a simple question: If neoliberalism has taken over university administration, or the university system at large, who and where are the neoliberals? When did they first appear, and can we track their purported acquisition of power or influence over time? These questions may seem obvious from a social scientific perspective, yet in the world of argument-by-declamation that characterizes much of the higher education literature, nobody appears to have ever tested the claim.
Turning to administrative ranks, we quickly find several indicators of a leftward shift that has paralleled the faculty. Although polling data on administrator ideology only recently became available, a 2018 survey of student-facing administrators—typically the lower-level ranks of student affairs and university life personnel—found that 71 percent identified on the political left. Conservatives comprised only 6 percent, indicating that this segment of university administration sits even further to the left than the faculty at large.
When we try to measure the purported rightward transformation, the speculated academic embrace of free-market ideology is nowhere to be found.
While proponents of the conservative transformation thesis might point out that this survey did not extend to executive-level administrators such as presidents and provosts, the bulk of university “administrative bloat” in the past four decades has actually occurred in the same lower-level ranks of student-facing administration. Between 1976 and 2011, executive level university administrators added about 150,000 new personnel to their ranks. Non-executive administrators swelled by over 630,000 in the same period, with the largest categories coming from student affairs and services. In total, these lower-level university administrators currently outnumber full-time faculty and, by every available indicator, they sit to the political left of even the ideologically skewed professoriate.
When we try to measure the purported rightward transformation, the speculated academic embrace of free-market ideology, the troublesome “neoliberals,” and the accompanying influence of conservative donors are nowhere to be found.
Instead, scholars such as Walsh and others who write in the same genre display a habit of focusing upon the exceptions that prove the rule. They cherry-pick foundations such as Olin, Walgreen, and Koch, or organizations such as the Federalist Society, and elevate them to the center of higher education philanthropy, when in fact these funders and their perspectives constitute tiny and shrinking intellectual minorities in an overwhelmingly left-leaning higher education system.
Even among academic disciplines that the right has supposedly targeted—economics and law—conservative and libertarian perspectives still remain distinct minorities.
Economics textbooks place a much heavier emphasis on pro-intervention “market failure theory” than on deregulation or critiques of political shortcomings. Faculty hiring patterns at top law schools display clear evidence of favoritism to progressive applicants, whereas comparably credentialed conservatives and libertarians tend to place at much lower ranked institutions.
In noting this empirical reality, I make no claims about the “proper” level of ideological balance in higher ed. Intellectual diversity does appear to carry value onto itself by breaking up ideological echo chambers and subjecting research to scrutiny from outside perspectives. Cross-examination of this type may be more important than ever, given the observed decline in scholarly rigor afflicting several of the most left-leaning academic disciplines.
Regardless of what one believes about ideological bias or skew, the claims made by the Urban Institute report, and others before it, are still subject to measurement. By eschewing any and all appropriate measures and focusing instead upon advancing a story of conservative ascendance through simple unproven assertion, the literature in this genre paints a deeply inaccurate picture of long-term ideological trends on campus.
When we turn to measurement instead of anecdote and unfounded assertion, and when we subject basic claims about academia’s ideological transformation to scrutiny, the evidence is overwhelming. The American university system has shifted, and continues to shift, sharply toward the political left.
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Indoctrinating Children With 'LGBTQ' Entertainment
Young minds are more frequently being subject to emotional manipulation in cartoons.
There was a time in America when children’s entertainment was a safe bet. Sure, we saw the slow creep of movie violence, more promiscuous characters, and more subject matter made for mature viewers, but we could certainly let our kids watch a Disney flick without worrying about our values being undermined.
Not anymore.
In recent years, we’ve seen homosexual and transgender characters popping up not only in kids’ movies and television programs but in animated children’s series as well. Nickelodeon’s “The Loud House” featured a homosexual male couple. Amazon’s “Danger and Eggs” promoted a transgender character. Disney’s “Star vs. The Forces of Evil” included a same-sex kiss. Last year, The Cartoon Network’s “Steven Universe” included a same-sex marriage proposal. More recently, Disney’s popular “Andi Mack” series featured a homosexual teenage couple.
This list only represents a fraction of programs now pushing the Left’s agenda to indoctrinate our children.
Clearly, there’s a bandwagon effect taking place, with one producer trying to outdo the others to ensure that children’s entertainment not only appeases the Rainbow Mafia but also serves as a conduit for their “LGBTQ” agenda.
One of the issues with the widespread portrayal of alternative lifestyles in movies and on television is that they’re not being presented as an unusual alternative. The entertainment industry doesn’t want kids to know the vast majority of Americans don’t live this way. And they want them growing up to embrace same-sex marriage or gender selection.
But it goes even further. One of the long-term goals is, frankly, to undermine the very foundation of Western civilization, which is embodied by the Christian faith and the prehistoric and pan-cultural family structure of a man, a woman, and their children.
Teaching young people to have compassion for others is one thing. Brainwashing them to think that abnormal is normal, and vice versa, is a threat to our very way of life.
To accomplish this objective, its proponents ensure that nothing is really spelled out for kids. After all, children are innocent and impressionable. Frame the most unnatural lifestyle choice as merely a form of love, and they’ll never question it (especially if their own parents were inculcated with the same beliefs when they were kids).
Leanne Itali writes for the Associated Press, “Wilson Cruz, a co-star in the new Hulu animated children’s series ‘The Bravest Knight,’ describes the show’s dad couple this way: ‘We’re not explaining homosexuality, or same-gender sexuality. We’re talking about the love of a family.” And that’s the heart of the problem. Children watching these shows don’t have anything explained to them. It’s all pure emotion. And producers hope that parents aren’t around to teach their children otherwise.
Worse, those who dare to speak out are now branded as villains. Take Mario Lopez, for example, the former teen-show star (“Saved By the Bell”) and current TV host who recently suggested that perhaps parents shouldn’t raise three-year-olds as transgender. The result? You guessed it: Lopez was roundly condemned by the Human Rights Campaign for endangering the “safety and well-being of LGBTQ youth.” Of course, he caved and apologized.
As for the argument that children’s shows promoting alternative lifestyles are merely preparing kids for living in the real world, Declan Leary writes at National Review, “There is a fine line between depicting the world as it is for realism’s sake and normalizing the current state of affairs.”
But let’s be honest. This isn’t about helping kids understand the world around them. It’s about indoctrinating them to embrace perverse lifestyles and the notion that the traditional American family is somehow abnormal. This isn’t just about transgenders reading a children’s book in a library. It’s about using entertainment as a pathway into the hearts and minds of impressionable boys and girls.
More than just a concern when it comes to children’s entertainment, our kids are faced with Social Emotional Learning standards being adopted by public schools across the country. These standards are complete with vague descriptions that seem harmless on the surface but teach kids to make decisions based on emotion.
“The problem is not that children have emotions,” writes Teresa Mull at The Heartland Institute, “but that government schools can’t acknowledge that absolute truth and right and wrong exist, let alone what truth, right, and wrong are. So, we have a bunch of kids trained to embrace their feelings — and since feelings can’t be right or wrong, society devolves into chaos.”
And chaos is where we’re headed if parents continue to turn a blind eye to the Left’s radical and dangerous social conditioning of our children.
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Australia: Overcoming the odds in high school
Parents often focus more on the choice of a secondary school, but it turns out primary school is probably more important for a child’s academic success. Many parents send their child to the local primary school but then invest significantly more time and money in choosing a secondary school.
And Years 11 and 12 are often the time where parents are most hands-on in their child’s education, helping with subject selections, constantly updating ATAR calculations, and appealing assessment results to gain the moral victory of a few extra marks.
But ultimately, student achievement at this late stage depends largely on having mastered literacy and numeracy skills in primary school.
The well-established education phenomenon, the Matthew Effect — the tendency for differences in student achievement in early primary school to grow into more significant differences towards the end of secondary school, unless rectified — means that waiting for improvement in secondary school is often simply waiting to fail.
That’s why effective early literacy and numeracy teaching is so important to ensure students don’t fall behind. And it should be a priority for secondary schools to identify underachieving students when they enrol.
This is especially the case for students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. Our new research has found it is more challenging for secondary schools to help disadvantaged students succeed, compared to primary schools.
Using NAPLAN data and the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, we identified only 3 Australian secondary schools that are both disadvantaged and high-achieving (no, before you ask, these schools do not receive more funding than other similarly disadvantaged schools). In contrast, 21 Australian primary schools are both disadvantaged and high-achieving.
There are evidence-based policies for improving outcomes for disadvantaged students in high school. For example, international education datasets indicate school discipline issues are especially prevalent among disadvantaged secondary schools in Australia. And direct instruction — an evidence-based teaching practice, where new content is explicitly taught in sequenced and structured lessons — is less common at disadvantaged secondary schools.
A policy focus on building positive school cultures and ensuring teachers are well-equipped to use effective direct instruction could significantly improve academic outcomes for disadvantaged students. And this wouldn’t necessarily require more taxpayer funding.
We all want to ensure that no student finishes school without essential knowledge and skills. But the solution isn’t to spend more money.
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