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enterprise of higher education. 3 It informs more than the odd case of the professor who writes articles that can be read as promoting man-boy love or as condoning terrorism. 4 It includes practices and customs such as the inability of the football coach to influence the quarterback’s grade in math class. It gives academics a (circumscribed) zone of autonomy in which to work.
    The claim by conservatives that the academy is under the control of a left-wing professoriate is an old one, and studies since the fifties have tended to confirm the general suspicion that professors, as a group, are more liberal than the general public. In 1952, for example, social science professors voted for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential election by a margin of 58 percent to 30 percent, even though Eisenhower (who, when he ran for office, was the president of Columbia University) won the election by almost 11 percentage points. 5 Stevenson was not exactly Ho Chi Minh, though. He was, by the standards of only a decade later, quite conservative on issues like race relations and women’s rights. It was after the campus protests of the sixties—over free speech, civil rights, the draft, and the war in Vietnam—that the notion of the professoriate as a group of tenured radicals became dominant in the discourse of the culture wars. 6 That charge was revived after September 11 by critics outside the academy, such as David Horowitz (who was once an untenured radical himself, but by 2001 had become an activist against academic leftism), 7 and there have been a few surveys—from a social scientific point of view rather sketchy ones—done to support it. 8
    In 2007, two sociologists working at Harvard and George Mason, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, conducted a national survey of the political views of the professoriate that observed all the protocols of scientific research and that has a good claim to being an accurate statistical picture of the views of the 630,000 full-time professors, at every level of institution, from research universities to community colleges, in the United States at the time. 9 (Gross and Simmons did not include part-time faculty in their survey, although they note that about 47 percent of college instruction in the United States is done by part-timers. Assessing the views of part-time faculty presents methodological challenges, but of course those views are relevant to an understanding of politics in academic life.) The results of the survey are quite stunning.

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    Gross and Simmons argue that the significant finding in their survey is that professors are not as radical as some critics have charged: 9.4 percent of American professors identify themselves as “extremely liberal” (only 3 percent of professors say they are Marxists) and 13.5 percent of faculty describe themselves as “liberal activists.” These self-reports are meaningful because professors demonstrate a much greater degree of ideological constraint in their views than most people do. That is, if professors say that they are liberals, their views on specific issues will be coherently and consistently liberal views. 10 In the general population, most people do not know what it means to identify themselves as liberals or conservatives. People will report themselves to be liberals in an opinion poll and then answer specific questions with views normally thought of as conservative. People also give inconsistent answers to the same questions over time. This is because most people are not ideologues—they don’t have coherent political belief systems—and their views on the issues do not hang together. Their reporting is not terribly accurate. 11 But academics do tend to be ideologues, in this social science sense, so if less than 10 percent of them identify themselves as “extremely liberal,” that is a relatively reliable finding. If more than 90 percent of full-time faculty are not “extremely liberal,” then academia is not