Conservative and Liberal Threats to Open Inquiry

Data from FIRE show students and scholars attack from the left, while administrators and outsiders attack from the right.

Our friends over at FIRE keep a running list of incidents in which scholars have been targeted for something they have said or done. Helpfully, not only do they catalog cases by year and university but also by who initiates the targeting and what ideological direction they are coming from (relative to the position or issue at hand). 

But do these targeting mobs always look the same? Are threats from the left mirrored in frequency by threats from the right?

One thing that becomes immediately apparent looking at the data is that the ideological motivation for targeting of scholars on college campuses does not originate from just one side of the political aisle. 

That said, the current gap between left and right is nearly as big as it has been in the past 20 years, with over 75% of targeting incidents coming from the right this year. 

This does not mean that the targeting incidents are monolithic in nature. If we break down the initiators of the targeting incidents, we see clear discrepancies emerge. The graphs below show the relative percentage (left vs. right) of the politics of those doing the targeting. So, for example, if undergraduates from the left show a value of 40%, this means in that year 40% of the targeting incidents involved left-of-center undergraduate students initiating the targeting. It is important to note that any individual incident can involve multiple groups initiating the targeting.

FIRE’s data suggests that undergraduate (UG) and graduate (GR) students on the political left are considerably more likely than students on the right to engage in targeting incidents. However, students are not the only initiators of the targetings. 

So, what about targeting incidents in which other scholars participate? For 18 out of the past 20 years, according to FIRE’s data, scholars on the left are more likely to initiate targeting than scholars on the right.

This finding could be explained several ways. First, this may be a base rate issue; we know that liberal professors significantly outnumber conservative professors, so perhaps there are just fewer conservative faculty who are willing to initiate. However, by standardizing against the number of targeting incidents from the right, this analysis would be controlling for that. 

A second possible explanation is that people are willing to abuse whatever levers of power they have. It seems likely that students and scholars on the left believe themselves to have more power than students and others on the right. 

A third possible explanation is that perhaps there are just more external initiators of these targeting incidents from the right, meaning that the smaller base rate of conservative faculty would result in a lower initiation rate. I will detail this more below.

So what about the last source of internal pressure on university campuses? It turns out that over the last 11 years, university administrators are more likely to initiate targeting incidents from the right than from the left. 

Perhaps this could be a function of university administration leaning more conservative. But one alternative explanation is that external forces (state legislators, the general public, etc.) could be applying more of a conservative pressure to the administration in order to act in any given situation.

In support of that hypothesis, we do in fact see a general trend of activists and politicians being more involved in targeting incidents that come from the right than from the left. 

Because the data indicate when there is more than one group initiating a targeting event, I was able to run a network analysis to explore the relationships between the sources of the targeting events. Such network analyses can be graphed to show the frequency with which different groups ‘work together’ in these targeting events, as well as the centrality of any one group to the overall relationships.

Below is the result of a network analysis for targeting incidents from the left. The thicker a line is connecting two nodes (represented by the gray circles), the more often those two groups appear together in any given targeting event. The closeness of the nodes represents how closely connected the group is to other groups. Another way to think about the closeness is how often is that group (represented by the node) working with other groups, versus working alone.

As we can see, the centrality of undergraduate students to the other groups indicates that undergraduate students are heavily involved in targeting incidents which originate from the left and include scholars, graduate students, activists, and even administrators. In other words, undergraduate students appear to be a ‘common theme’ amongst left-originating targeting incidents in which more than one group is represented.

However, when we run a network analysis on targeting incidents from the right (below), we see weaker relationships with groups. 

This implies that targeting incidents from the right tend to be more distributed in nature (i.e., it is not as frequently the case that students and scholars are involved together in targeting). This is further supported by a higher clustering coefficient (which measures how tightly grouped the network is) for the network analysis of targeting incidents coming from the left (0.84) than those coming from the right (0.72). 

With that said, it is worth noting that a permutation test (using 10,000 permutations) on the clustering coefficients suggests that these two coefficients are not statistically different (p = .36). In other words, we don’t find a statistical difference in how tightly grouped these two separate networks were.

Together, this data starts to paint a nuanced picture of how targeting incidents arise and the sort of in-group versus out-group origination of them. Whereas students and scholars tend to be more frequently engaged in targeting incidents from the left, we see a comparatively greater level of involvement from politicians and activists from the right. 

This is not to say that conservative students and scholars don’t target liberal scholars, nor that liberal politicians and activists don’t target conservative scholars. But there are measurable differences in the nature of who is involved in targeting incidents based on the political direction from which the targeting occurs. 

This analysis could help explain the misperception that only the left targets scholars, as when targeting is done by the right, it often does not take the same centralized, intra-institution approach. 

In order for open inquiry to flourish, we should be aware of the reality that there is no singular threat to open inquiry. While it is true that internal threats (from administrators, students, and other scholars) pose a direct threat, threats from the outside are no less pernicious (nor uncommon), and can result in subsequent internal threats from administrators.