Studies Confirm Leftward Bias in Higher Education

Anyone who is both honest and paying attention has known for a long time that higher education in the United States is tilted sharply leftward, and the bias has only gotten worse over the years. Two recent studies confirm how bad it has gotten.

Jon Shields and Yuval Avnur have an op-ed in the WSJ with the unfortunate title, Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias: A massive database shows college courses dealing with race and the Middle East lean sharply left. I say unfortunate because any mention of President Trump triggers vehement reactions among people with TDS, and the issue is not about him. It existed long before he was President, and any solution will take time well beyond his departure.

The study uses a database that scrapes college syllabi from the web, including the assigned reading. The authors look particularly at the issue of race in the criminal justice system, and the result confirms what I have observed over years of hiring recent graduates.

Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi, as it should given its scholarly and public influence. In the U.S. it is assigned more often than “Hamlet” and nearly as often as John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.”

Ms. Alexander argues that America’s war on drugs is akin to Jim Crow—a system designed to control and subjugate black Americans. Her work invites scholarly controversy, drawing criticism from historians and social scientists. Among them is James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017). While Mr. Forman is no fan of mass incarceration, he doesn’t think it’s the product of a racist conspiracy. He notes that tough-on-crime policies have enjoyed the support of black leaders trying to halt soaring crime rates in their cities.

In courses that teach Ms. Alexander’s book, Mr. Forman’s book is paired with it less than 4% of the time. Works by other prominent critics of “The New Jim Crow”—including political scientist Michael Fortner of Claremont McKenna, law professor John Pfaff of Fordham and sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton—are assigned with Ms. Alexander even less often.

Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault. Ms. Davis, a two-time vice-presidential nominee of the Communist Party USA, has said that “the only true path of liberation for black people is the one that leads toward a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this country.” In his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” Mr. Coates wrote that “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Even Ms. Alexander, reviewing his book for the New York Times, said she was “disappointed” that it offered “little hope . . . that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America.” Foucault (1926-84), a French theorist, reduced all Western societies to intricate and oppressive systems of social control.

If we assume for the sake of argument that the authors are correct that Alexander’s book should be assigned at all, assignment of a critical review is absolutely essential for a quality education on the subject. Pairing it with an even-further out there view is indoctrination, not education.

Over the course of the years, CJLF has hired many law students and recent graduates in our fellowship programs. We have also been actively engaged in the issue of capital punishment. I found that many students’ education on the subject (using the term “education” loosely) consisted entirely of feeding them the anti side’s arguments. They came to us having never heard the pro side, and they were often surprised to learn that many things that they were taught as conclusively proved truth are actually built on a foundation of sand. Again, that is not real education.

On a related issue, Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman have an op-ed in The Hill, titled Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed. They report:

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

Again, this confirms what I have been told by then-recent graduates at CJLF. Knowing full well that they would be graded more harshly by left-wing professors (i.e., nearly all of them) for expressing conservative views than conforming ones, they slanted their papers toward the approved narrative.

Romm and Waldman focused on an issue outside CJLF’s scope, but the concern is the conformity, not the issue:

To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.

Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.

For 77% of students to be afraid to express their actual belief on a public controversy is appalling. Romm and Waldman probably picked this issue because it has the widest gap of any between the approved position of the leftist educational establishment and the views of the general population. A different issue would produce a smaller number, as more students would actually agree with the orthodoxy. Regardless, the survey result confirms what we have long known. The free debate and exchange of ideas that should be an essential part of education is being crushed under the weight of mandatory conformity to “woke” positions.

It is high time for the governing boards of all colleges and universities in the United States to wake up to this threat and take vigorous action. The faculty and administrators who have brought this about by malice or negligence need to be removed and replaced.