An Update to “Why Are Professors Liberals?”: Jєωιѕн Influence Firmly Ensconced in Academia by the 1960s by Kevin MacDonald

Higher education was a crucial micromobilization context for a number of left social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which further enhanced the institution’s liberal reputation; with concerted cultural efforts by American conservatives, especially from the 1950s on, to build a collective identity for their movement around differentiation from various categories of “liberal elites,” not least liberal professors; with restricted opportunities for Americans on the far left to enter other institutional spheres; and with self-reinforcing processes by which selfselection into the academic profession by liberals resulted in a more liberal professoriate whose reputation for liberalism was thereby maintained or enhanced. (pp. 158–159)

Further, because elite universities attempt to most represent the zeitgeist of the field, Gross and Fosse point out they will offer positions to scholars they see as exemplary; political attitudes are a major part of being exemplary. As noted above, Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that many liberal academics openly acknowledge that they would discriminate against a conservative job candidate. This rigorous policing of the attitudes of professors at elite institutions in turn leads to elite institutions being to the left of lesser institutions. In the academic hierarchy, the result is that graduate students coming from elite institutions are most representative of the leftist academic culture, either because of their socialization in the academic environment or simply because of self-interest as a member of a group (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs) whose interests are championed by the left. This becomes progressively diluted as one goes to the second- and third-tier schools and eventually down to K–12 education. The result is a liberal social environment at all levels of the educational system which in turn has measurable effects on student attitudes. Public opinion surveys carried out since the 1960s show that going to college results in attitude change in a liberal direction compared to parents. If education level remained the same, there was little change in attitudes (Kaufmann, 2004, p. 191).

Related to the importance of elite institutions in shaping the intellectual climate at universities noted above, they deem it relevant to point out that Jєωs entered the academic world in large numbers after WWII and became overrepresented among professors, especially in elite academic departments in the social sciences — that is, in the decade immediately prior to the triumph of the multicultural left in the academic world. They cite recent survey data indicating that 25% of faculty at research universities are Jєωιѕн compared to 10% overall; these percentages are even higher in departments of social science at research universities (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Correspondingly, conservative Protestants are underrepresented, especially among faculty of elite research universities. Further, and importantly, as noted above, the most liberal professors work at the most elite institutions — a point to be returned to below.

These findings fit well with the views of other social scientists. For example, David Hollinger (1996, p. 160) calls attention to “a secular, increasingly Jєωιѕн, decidedly left-of-center intelligentsia based largely but not exclusively in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences.” He notes “the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jєωs” (p. 4) in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jєωιѕн influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism.

The blog post and video cited above lend important support to this thesis by mentioning two studies from much earlier, showing that by the critical decade of the1960s and continuing in the 1970s Jєωs were well-established in departments of social science at elite universities.
An article by Lipset and Ladd (1971),[1] using survey data of 60,000 academics from 1969, shows that the 1960s were a critical period for the rise of a Jєωιѕн academic culture well to the left of non-Jєωιѕн professors. Jєωs represented around 12% of faculty in general, but around 25% of the younger faculty (less than age 50) at Ivy League universities—percentages that were much higher than in previous decades.  Jєωs were heavily represented on the faculties of other elite public and private universities as well, particularly in the politically relevant fields of the law and the social sciences.
Moreover, Jєωιѕн faculty were more heavily published than non-Jєωιѕн faculty, indicating greater influence. This is important because the academic world is a top-down institution: those at the top train the next generation of scholars and police the recruitment of new faculty—a professor at Harvard places his Ph.D. students at Wisconsin, Michigan or Berkeley, and they in turn place their students at Wisconsin State University—Oshkosh, etc. They therefore have more influence on the future of the field than less-published scholars. As indicated above based on recent research, liberal faculty are perfectly willing to discriminate on the basis of political views, and I think it’s quite likely that this also occurred in the 1960s.
Importantly, Lipset and Ladd also found that Jєωιѕн faculty were well to the left of non-Jєωιѕн faculty. Thus, a considerably larger percentage of Jєωιѕн faculty rated themselves as liberal or left, (74.5%) compared to less than 40% of non-Jєωιѕн faculty. In the social sciences, 84.9% of Jєωιѕн faculty compared to 76% of Protestants and 65.2% of Catholics described themselves as liberal or left.  59.1% of Jєωιѕн faculty approved of 1960s student radical activism, compared to around 40% for non-Jєωιѕн faculty. Jєωιѕн faculty were also more likely to approve relaxing standards in order to recruit more minority faculty and students.
Within the Jєωιѕн segment, the least religious Jєωs were the most liberal. This is interesting because, as docuмented in The Culture of Critique, in general left/liberal Jєωs were not religious but were strongly identified as Jєωs and saw their politics as advancing specifically Jєωιѕн interests. The leftist politics of the new academic elite was thus closely related to Jєωιѕн identification.
The other study mentioned by the anonymous blogger is from a book by Harriet Zuckerman which focuses on elite scientists.[2]

The blog also mentions the study by Charles Kadushin which is also discussed in Chapter 6 of The Culture of Critique as follows:

Providing further evidence in this regard (ethnocentric biases in citation patterns), the studies by Kadushin (1974), Shapiro (1989, 1992), and Torrey (1992) of twentieth-century American intellectuals indicate not only a strong overlap among Jєωιѕн background, Jєωιѕн ethnic identification, Jєωιѕн associational patterns, radical political beliefs, and psychoanalytic influence but also a pattern of mutual citation and admiration. In Kadushin’s study, almost half of the complete sample of elite American intellectuals were Jєωιѕн (Kadushin 1974, 23). The sample was based on the most frequent contributors to leading intellectual journals, followed by interviews in which the intellectuals “voted” for another intellectual whom he or she considered most influential in their thinking. Over 40 percent of the Jєωs in the sample received six or more votes as being most influential, compared to only 15 percent of non-Jєωs (p. 32).

As Eric P. Kaufmann points out in his account of the general decline of Anglo America, once the new value set was institutionalized, it became the focus of status competition within the boundaries set by these movements (Kaufmann, 2004, p. 247). The emergence of the new intellectual elite was facilitated because it possessed “social capital,” in the form of social ties to the mass media, corporate cultural intermediaries, and the state intelligentsia—where dominant interpretations of reality are generated (Diani, 1997; Kaufmann, 2004; Diani & McAdams, 2003). In general, the mass media was an important source of favorable coverage of intellectual and political movements of the left, particularly psychoanalysis and 1960s political radicalism (Rothman & Lichter, 1982). For example, “Popular images of Freud revealed him as a painstaking observer, a tenacious worker, a great healer, a truly original explorer, a paragon of domestic virtue, the discover of personal energy, and a genius” (Hale, 1995, p. 289).

Moreover, as implied by Gross and Fosse, once an organization becomes dominated by a particular intellectual perspective, there is enormous inertia created by the fact that the informal networks dominating elite universities serve as gatekeepers for the next generation of scholars. Aspiring academics are subjected to a high level of indoctrination at the undergraduate and graduate levels; there is tremendous psychological pressure to adopt the fundamental intellectual assumptions that lie at the center of the power hierarchy of the discipline. Once such a movement attains intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that people would attracted to these movements because of the prestige associated with them. And, as Gross and Fosse argue, conservatives who are turned off by these ideas, simply self-select to go into a different line of work.