Liberal Versus Conservative Stinks

In a recent Public Opinion Quarterly article “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,” John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick pit themselves against “right-wing activists and scholars,” citing our scholarship (Klein and Stern in Academic Questions 18(1): 40–52, 2005a; Klein and Western in Academic Questions 18(1): 53–65, 2005). Here, we analyze Zipp and Fenwick’s characterization of our research and find it faulty. We, then, turn to their selfidentification “liberal vs. conservative” findings and show they concord with our analysis. If one feels that it is a problem that humanities and social science faculty at 4-year colleges and universities are vastly predominantly democratic voters, mostly with views that may called establishment-left, progressive, or status-quo oriented, then such concerns should not be allayed by Zipp and Fenwick’s article. We commence the article with a criticism of the “liberal versus conservative” framework because it is the source of much of the confusion surrounding controversies such as the one over the ideological profile of faculty.