How can we get more conservative professors?
That is the wrong question says Mike Munger
Below is a transcript of my zoom discussion with Mike Munger, February 11, 2025 addressing the question “How can we get more conservative professors?” I messed up the zoom video recording so a lightly edited transcript is below. I greatly regret not being able to show the video, because Mike had some workmen going up and down a ladder in the background of our chat to fix the heat, and I was sure that John Cleese was going to pop out of the attic.
Mike Munger is a professor of political science at Duke University, and a thoughtful and throught provoking (I think he still calls himself a) Libertarian colleague who has run for Governor and the North Carolina General Assembly as the nominee of the North Carolina Libertarian Party in the past. I have known Mike since he taught me during my first semester in graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill in 1992 (Public Policy Analysis; he wrote a good text that I have used in a policy analysis class at Duke).
Mike is a unique thinker who defines academic freedom as flowing from the freedom of association protection in the first amendment (not of speech), and his ideas here have greatly influenced mine. He has also written about euvoluntary (true) cooperation and the puzzle of whether, how and why a series of moral decisions could lead to an immoral outcome when analyzing capitalism/markets.
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DON: Mike, the question How can we get more conservative professors? is asked of me all the time by family, friends, folks at church and commentors on my writings.
MIKE: I hear much the same thing, but that is the wrong question. The PROBLEM STATEMENT in higher education is that we are not currently focused on educating our students.
The problem is not the mix of ideology of the faculty, but in the commitment of the faculty to exposing students to “the other team’s first string” in hearing new ideas and learning and practicing how to think critically and to make arguments.
And just as it is a basic fact that faculty are more liberal than average, it is also the case that conservative students are not getting PhDs at a high rate—they want to do other things.
DON: How are we failing our students?
MIKE: Well, the sentiment that ‘we need more conservative faculty’ is driven by conservative students feeling berated, or fears that their views might be berated so they stay silent. The conservative students, whether they speak up or out or not, have been exposed to arguments they disagree with. They hear them all the time, stated as unassailable fact. The students we are failing is the LIBERAL students, because they are not learning to make arguments with the other side’s first team.
DON: The argument that we are failing liberal students could be viewed as a matter of a faulty private good (they aren’t getting their monies worth). Are there public good aspects of this failure as well?
MIKE: Yes, I think there are. In the process of failing our liberal students, we have created a stilted on-campus discussion of ideas. The best ideas come from the collision of divergent ones, and then seeing if we can develop facts to move knowledge forward in a given area.
DON: It seems to me there is a huge paradox at work on college campuses. The faculty are deeply embedded in debates in their area of expertise that are robust—we know how to fight and argue in a productive manner. However, our students do not enjoy such a culture.
MIKE: Yes, I agree. Faculty specialize into a discipline. An economist cannot say to the sociologist that you can only analyze at the individual level. Sociologists have their disciplinary methods, economists have theirs and so on. There are of course overlaps.
However, I am a big proponent of safe spaces on college campuses. In fact, the idea that like minded political scientists could huddle and work on their scholarship flows from the Frist Amendment guarantee of the freedom of association. It is just that the entire campus cannot be a safe space. The groups come together in class, discussions, debates and so on.
DON: I have tried this argument out, and I must say that critics of the University who say we are too liberal hate it—they want or need the ‘slur’ of safe space to denigrate the university.
MIKE: We need both the safe spaces to hone arguments as well as places in and out of class for students to practice making them against the other team’s first string.
DON: I have tried this analogy to make this point. My Ph.D. is in public health which brings a frequentist statistical perspective of the world. You seek to make an inference about a population from a sample. Duke University is well known for Bayesian inference, which focuses on the updating of probabilities based on new information. If I go to the weekly Bayesian seminar and argue that the Frequentist perspective is superior, that is not the time, nor the place. The Bayesians are honing their methods. If in the school of Public Policy we are discussing the impact of a school voucher program, or tax credits for energy efficient heat pumps, the two branches of statistical inference are welcome to make claims based on evidence. The collision could be productive.
MIKE: Yes, and the crucial thing about the disciplines in the academy are that all facts are not the same.
DON: Yes, I agree. There is an equality of idea or hypothesis (you can ask anything) but not all answers are equally valid, with evidentiary claims judged by the rules of the discipline. If I say palliative care reduces cost and you ask for the evidence and I show you a model where the p value for the parameter estimate of the impact of palliative care on medical costs is p=0.50 you will say NO TAYLOR you have not made the case. Your assertion of fact is invalid. And that is not canceling me. That is scholars talking about research.
MIKE: This is important and goes back to the reason that the problem of the academy is education and not ideology. Duke does not need half of the Biology faculty to be creationists to bring ideological balance. All facts are not the same.
DON: And we should build an expectation in our students of changing their mind. We do it all the time as scholars within disciplines, often on very narrow and discrete items in isolation.
MIKE: Yes, that is how specialization and division of labor work in the academy—intense focus on a certain part or domain of political science, for example. We have to make sure that we can pull up out of our disciplinary focus and have broader debates as well, particularly across the ideological perspective. And I am not only worried that liberal faculty are cocooned in elite universities, but in some other places that I admire, like Hillsdale, faculty there never engage the other side’s first team either.
DON: My teaching of Bayes theorem in the introduction to public policy class at Duke seemed so dry and rote to me 20 years ago, but I enjoy it much more now. I try and bring examples of how I have changed my mind in my research expertise area, but also in my every day life. A few years back I provided a quick case study of my decision to buy a new car. I had typically only bought cars that were near-new, say less than 20,000 miles to avoid the massive depreciation in the first month, of a new car. I decided to buy a new car that was one-year old (last years model, but new after the new model had come out) and demonstrated to the students my thought process—why I had changed my mind.
DON: Mike, let’s shift gears and I want to ask you about protest on campus. Duke University has a very broad protest policy that essentially says you cannot disrupt, and the purpose of protest is to disrupt and make people think. Where should we draw the line?
MIKE: You should not be able to protest an academically valid safe space activity. If you show up to the Bayesian statistics seminar saying no, frequentism or die, then the stats faculty could have your removed. But I also said the entire campus cannot be a safe space. So, lets take the case of a talk or a public ceremony.
Jerry Seinfeld gave the 2024 Commencement address at Duke, and that was controversial for some because of his position on the nation of Israel. The protest that took place was totally legitimate and fine. Some students stood, held some signs and made some statements, and then after two or three minutes they walked out, to deafening boos. That was not disruptive, or too disruptive and a free society should be glad protests like this take place. If a protest continues and keeps others from hearing a speaker then that is over the line and there should be some punishment.
DON: What is something that we could do at Duke to improve the education we provide to our students?
MIKE: Team teaching of introductory courses for undergraduates with the faculty taking care to be clear about how they disagree with one another, and in doing so show that conflict can be intellectually productive is one way. We need to model for our students that in what we know the most about, any question can be asked, but not all answers are the same. We need to model this for them and do so with humility.
DON: Mike, thank you for your time.