Those liberal professors.

Byline: The Register-Guard

A new study funded by the conservative Randolph Foundation confirms the obvious: College professors are politically to the left of most Americans. This will come as no surprise to anyone who lives in or near a university town, or who knows that employees of the University of California system constituted John Kerry's largest donor bloc.

The interesting question is not whether faculty members are liberal, but why - and whether it makes any difference.

The study, conducted by a professor at George Mason University and two colleagues at the University of Toronto, was based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty members at 183 four-year institutions. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents identified themselves as liberal, while only 15 percent said they are conservative.

What's more, liberals outnumber conservatives in every field of study - not just in the arts, humanities and social sciences, but also in science, engineering and business.

This imbalance causes some familiar arguments to be stood on their heads. Conservatives present themselves as an embattled minority, calling for protections against a hostile academic environment. Institutions are faulted for their lack of diversity, with ideology joining race and gender as factors that colleges are urged to weigh when faculty members are hired. The remedy, presumably, is a form of ideological affirmative action to advance the careers of conservative scholars.

Liberals offer self-flattering explanations for the imbalance: The academic atmosphere of open-minded inquiry fosters and accommodates liberal ideas. Education itself, and particularly mass access to it, is a liberal idea to which people of a liberal bent are naturally drawn.

Academic careers are notoriously ill-paid in their early stages, and are more likely to appeal to people who are anti-materialistic and idealistic - in other words, liberals. College campuses are refuges from the conservatism that dominates institutions ranging from business to the military, so the academic world is one of the few places people with a liberal outlook can make themselves comfortable.

Conservatives offer different explanations: Faculty members are insulated from the harsh realities of the world, and thus develop a liberalism that is synonymous with naivete. College campuses are slow to change, so the conservative ideas of the past few decades have not yet penetrated the ivy-covered walls. Today's faculty members came of age during a period of liberal ascendancy in the 1960s and '70s, and their politics have become stagnant and nostalgic.

All of these explanations are plausible - and irrelevant. What matters is not the cause of faculty members' political leanings, but their effect on education and research. Liberal faculty members' dominance would become a matter of concern only if it corrupted the integrity of the academic enterprise. Corruption would manifest itself in a variety of ways, ranging from discrimination against conservatives in hiring to ridicule of conservative ideas in the classroom.

Many academic fields are immune to such corruption. Calculus and Old English, for instance, don't lend themselves to ideological spin. Subjects such as history or political science, the presentation of which unavoidably includes a point of view, are inoculated against orthodoxy by the implicit idea that more than one perspective exists. And if liberal faculties were allowing their politics to strangle free inquiry and debate, higher education would be suffering - yet universities are the strongest part of the nation's educational system, and attract students from all over the world.

Teachers who punish students for their political beliefs, or who exclude important ideas because of their political pedigree, aren't being liberal or conservative. They're being bad teachers. Such teachers can undoubtedly be found, but they are also undoubtedly in the minority.

The political pendulum is always swinging on college campuses, but as it does, important values remain unchanged: open inquiry, intellectual honesty and free debate, to name a few. The preservation of these values, not the transitory political opinions of faculty members, should be of primary concern.