Inside and outside

 A couple of weeks ago, I had a post on declining public confidence in universities.  Most people who've written on this topic say that the cause is internal--something universities have done or failed to do-- and that they need to reform in order to win back support.   I suggested that the major cause was external:  that leading Republicans had become more critical of universities, and the public (especially Republicans) followed.  In this post, I'll elaborate on that point, focusing on one frequently mentioned factor:  political bias.  Megan McArdle writes "in the wider world, asking whether academia really skews left makes you look like an idiot or, slightly more charitably, like someone so encased in a bubble that they don’t even know what they’re missing."   In 2021, an Axios/Ipsos survey asked if you agreed or disagreed with the statements "colleges and universities are biased in favor of liberal ideas and beliefs" and "colleges and universities are biased in favor of conservative ideas and beliefs."  I combined those into five groups:  those who thought they were biased in favor of only liberal beliefs, only conservative beliefs, both liberal and conservative beliefs, not biased, and don't know.*

                                    All            College grads
Liberal only                37%            49%
Conservative only        9%               7%
Both                             9%                6%
Not biased                   14%              17%
Don't know                  32%              21%

Less than half of people believe that there is a liberal bias.  Among the public, 32% think that there is a conservative bias or no bias; among college graduates, it's 30%.  And even among college graduates, a lot of people say they don't know.  So in the "wider world," there isn't a consensus on the topic.  

These results illustrate a more general point.  Although there's a good deal of media coverage of higher education, it's a niche topic--it rarely appears on TV news or in local newspapers.  Also, there are no standard measures that are regularly reported--even someone who follows the issue just gets a collection of individual events. As a result, actual conditions have little influence on public perceptions.  But if a prominent politician speaks out about universities, that is a major story, and people have a sense of how to react:  it depends on how they generally feel about that politician.  So what political leaders say does make a difference.  

*People who said they were biased in favor of one side and didn't know about the other were counted as biased in favor of only that side.  Disagree on one and don't know about the other were counted as not biased, so the "don't know" category means don't know on both questions.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]