Since today is the first day of classes for the spring semester, here’s a timely post on the subject -- by now I’m sure you’ve heard the accusations from some conservatives that professors who have a liberal bias are likely to discriminate against students who have a conservative perspective -- I’ve already written several posts about such charges. As Inside Higher Education reports, more research is coming out to once again refute this paranoid accusation:

Frequently, these claims are based on studies — many have been released in the last two years — of professors. Party registration is documented, or professors respond to surveys, or syllabus content is rated. A new study being released today aims to debunk all of those studies. “The ‘Faculty Bias’ Studies: Science or Propaganda,” takes eight of the recent studies on faculty politics and judges them by five general tests of social science research. . . .

The various studies analyzed are by no means identical, but they tend to have two major themes (although some stress just one of the themes): that faculty members are liberal and that their liberal inclinations are significant in considering their performance. Lee’s analysis finds some support for the first theme. “Taken together, these studies at best suggest that college faculty members are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans,” he writes. However, even on this theme, he notes that the studies tend to exclude community college faculty members and to focus on faculty at elite institutions — probably skewing the results.

The second theme takes a more thorough beating in the study. “Among the most serious claims the authors make is that this liberal dominance results in systematic exclusion of conservative ideas, limited promotion opportunities for conservative faculty, and expression in the classroom of liberal perspectives that damage student leaning,” Lee writes. “These claims, however, are not supported by the research. Basic methodological flaws keep a critical reader from accepting the conclusions suggested by the authors.”

The article goes on to describe in more detail the empirical shortcomings of the eight studies about “bias in the classroom” and I recommend that you read the entire Inside Higher Education article for yourself to understand the specific problems Lee identified with some of them.

In general, Lee’s new study only confirms what I and virtually all of my colleagues have been saying all along -- yes, most faculty, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, tend to have a liberal perspective and/or identify themselves as Democrats. But this does not actually mean that we are guilty of quashing or retaliating against conservative viewpoints in our classroom.

In my personal experience, it is inevitable that a small but disproportionately vocal number of students in my classes will say that I have a liberal bias (although a greater number of students will tell you that I ultimately present a very balanced set of perspectives in my courses). But again, having a liberal bias is different from saying that I unfairly discriminated against them or tried to silence them in the classroom.

Let’s be sure to separate the two issues because they are not the same.