Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. begin Passing on the Right with a broad statement: “Progressives rule higher education.” Most other scholars who have investigated the politics and ideology of higher education agree. The key questions pertain to the degree of progressives’ rule, and the extent to which it matters. Does the rule lead to discrimination and a hostile environment? Does it affect research and teaching? Shields and Dunn—admittedly conservatives themselves—strive to answer these thorny questions with conscientious care.

The authors’ ultimate conclusion is nuanced, yet still poignantly critical of ideological slant: “What we found should prompt conservatives and liberals alike to rethink their views on higher education and the place of conservatives in it” (p. 4). In a nutshell, whereas they discovered a troubling lack of intellectual diversity in many domains and outright hostile treatment of conservatives in too many quarters, they also found not meaningless exceptions and mitigating factors. Such nuance lowers the indictment, as it were. But it is worth bearing in mind that it is not unusual for a bad situation to possess measures of nuance.

The extent of progressive rule in a department appears to be related to at least two factors. First, the more empirically-rigorous a discipline, the less room there generally is for ideology to play a role. In a second, related, sense, some disciplines and fields are more influenced by what the authors and such scholars as Christian Smith have called the “deeply embedded sacred project” of personal and egalitarian emancipation that derives from the utopian aspirations of the Enlightenment. According to Smith and our authors, this project “has shaped the culture of sociology and made it so appealing to generations of social scientists of the left” (p. 79). Conservatives typically do not buy these more sanguine views of human nature. Hence, the legions of Marxists in sociology greatly outweigh the flanks of conservatives. If you disagree with the “project,” you run the risk of being considered morally defective—a sense conveyed in a myriad of ways in campus encounters.

To ascertain the extent of conservative discontent, Shields and Dunn interviewed and surveyed 153 conservative professors in six disciplines in the social sciences and humanities at eighty-four universities that comprise a representative sample of public and private institutions: economics, political science, sociology, history; philosophy, and literature. Rather than attempting the thankless task of defining “conservatism,” the authors simply let prospective interviewees self-identify.

Focusing on these disciplines is appropriate for at least two reasons. First, the methods and content of such fields as engineering, natural science, and even economics marginalize ideology. “If every engineer in the nation believed in Marxism, how many conservatives would protest? They would regard it as a curious social fact” (p. 195). Equally important, as Shield and Dunn report, the social sciences constitute what Everett Carl Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset called “the political sciences” in The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (1957). Along with history and political philosophy, their content has the most political salience. I have found in my own experience that students and teachers of these subjects often wield disproportionate influence in the campus public sphere.

Shields and Dunn then asked each interviewee to provide an “intellectual biography” of his or her experiences on the job. The selections they present cover the gamut, including indefensible examples of mistreatment as well as more benign forms. Within the tensions of conservatism, social conservatives typically experience more stigma than the libertarian types.

Shields and Dunn also found several cases of genuine collegiality, though they were less prominent than the less sanguine. Many stories are often compelling and informative, and conservative academics across the land will no doubt identify with many portrayals. Among the most interesting stories in this section of the book are those that describe why some academics became conservative in the first place. Some represented conversions due to disconcerting encounters with intolerant colleagues in graduate school or on the job later, while others converted when they came to a personal realization of how unrealistic some progressive policy ideas can be when applied to the real world.

On the personal level, many conservative interviewees reported resorting to various coping strategies to avoid the outright stigmatization that several less-strategic interviewees had to endure. (The authors’ employ Erving Goffman’s concept of “stigma signals” to useful effect throughout the book.) In one of the more fascinating parts of the book, they discuss how many interviewees thought hard about how and when to “come out of the closet” as conservatives in a progressive environment. (Refer to Chapter 4, “Closeted Conservatives.”) Not surprisingly, many “come out” only after receiving tenure—a fact that should give pause to conservative political legislators and activists bent on restricting tenure protections. Sadly, some remain muzzled by design.

While many readers might find this analogy to the gay experience in America over the top, many conservatives will find it apt as applied to the context of higher education. (One thinks of Nietzsche’s epigrammatic observation that those who feel oppressed often learn how to be more “clever.”) Shields and Dunn portray the social benefits as well as the mental drawbacks of this strategy, which can achieve a measure of social peace at the price of intellectual honesty and self-respect.

True to their commitment to fairness and objectivity, the authors also discuss compensating “rewards” of being conservative on a liberal campus, which can include a pride in being distinctive and having an eye for original research ideas toward which the conventional progressive wisdom is more likely to be blind. And as mentioned, several conservatives found genuine respect among their colleagues. As is often true, the devil lies in the details.

Shields and Dunn also discuss some evidence of discrimination in three concrete areas: pay, the status of the journals in which one is published, and hiring. Though they raise important questions here, they acknowledge that the evidence is still circumstantial at this point. But when all is said and done, they reserve their strongest indictment for the last part of the book, entitled “Should We Care?”

In language reminiscent of John Stuart Mill’s classic defense of intellectual freedom and diversity, the authors make a convincing case that the quality of research and academic knowledge has suffered from the lack of true engagement between the liberal and conservative perspectives that exist in the world beyond academia’s closeted gates. “The problem is not progressivism. It is the absence of conservatives from many important domains of inquiry” (p. 185. ) They discuss some illuminating examples of how full academic knowledge has often been retarded by the ideological or epistemological exclusion of understandings that a conservative mind set could have brought to the table, including the role of religion in propelling the civil rights and other movements; the validity of the Moynihan Report, which progressives stigmatized until it was impossible to dismiss it; the illiberal aspects of the historical eugenics movement; and the neglect of the darker side of communism by most prominent academic historians even after the opening of the Soviet archives in the wake of communism’s fall.

One might add a domain that Shields and Dunn discuss but develop less fully: the impact on students’ educations. Students should be entitled to the most intellectually honest, diverse, and dynamic education possible, especially in this era of outrageous tuitions. Higher education forsakes a sacred fiduciary duty if it stifles this good. The authors conclude by correctly raising questions about the application of “affirmation action” to conservatives in hiring. (The practical problems alone of such a policy are forbidding, if not hilarious.) But the need for more intellectual diversity on campus is clear, and Passing on the Right convincingly tells us why.