WHEN THE BERLIN WALL fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, most political observers saw it as socialism’s swan song.
Three decades later however, it seems reports of socialism’s death were greatly exaggerated: Recent U.S. surveys indicate increasingly favorable views of socialism, at rates far higher than in the past.
A 1987 Pew Research Study showed that 70 percent of Americans identified themselves as “anti-communist.” Today, a College Pulse survey of 10,590 undergraduates reveals that 39 percent of students view socialism favorably, while an equal number have an unfavorable impression of the economic system (18 percent are unsure).
These results are of particular interest because millions of Americans form their political and economic outlook on college campuses. In the coming years, the ideas students are developing on those campuses will find their way into corporate workplaces, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other U.S. institutions.
How did socialism undergo such an astonishing rehabilitation in such a short time? To answer that question, we must look at what is being taught in these students’ college classrooms. Based on the most commonly assigned college readings, one might conclude the nation’s leading universities are turning into incubators for socialist thinkers.
Resurrecting Marx: Readings in socialism, by the numbers
If you haven’t been on a college campus recently, you might be surprised that the single-most-frequently assigned author in American university classrooms today is the socialist revolutionary Karl Marx. Consider the comparative data:
- At 3,856 classroom reading assignments, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto far outpaces every other work in the intellectual canon except for Plato’s Republic, a close second at 3,573 assignments.
- Professors are more likely to assign readings by Marx than by John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Even Adam Smith’s economic treatise The Wealth of Nations—featured on 1,587 syllabi—appears less frequently than Marx’s second-most-assigned text, Das Kapital, which was assigned in 1,798 classes.
Marx remains an important figure, but his standing in history books does not explain his disproportionate popularity compared to other thinkers.
Importantly, only 5% of the aforementioned Marx readings appear in economics or political science classrooms. Rather, most of these reading assignments are concentrated in the humanities, like history, English, and philosophy, where Marxist doctrine is a ubiquitous interpretive tool for social phenomena.
It would be a constructive critical-thinking exercise if Marx were assigned in comparative political philosophy classes, with students weighing his socialist ideas against competing thinkers. Unfortunately, the pedagogical fashionability of Marx reveals American university professors’ deep and growing hostility to economic liberty, private property rights, and markets in general.
The faculty echo chamber
Survey data allow us to pinpoint the origin of this hyper-politicized faculty. While college professors have always held socialist ideas in higher esteem than the American public, self-described left-liberals were a stable 45 percent of the professoriate from the 1960s until about 20 years ago. As recently as 1995, self-described conservative professors made up 22 percent of academia.
But around 2000—unlike incoming students or the general public—college faculty politics began to migrate sharply toward socialism. Today, left-liberals comprise a 60 percent majority of teaching faculty in the university system. The subset of faculty who identify on the far-left alone now matches the total number of faculty to the right of center.
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. His most recent book (co-authored with Jason Brennan) is Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education.
1Figures calculated from the Open Syllabus Project database (https://opensyllabus.org), June 2019.
2Charts compiled from the Carnegie Commission (1969–1984) and Higher Education Research Institute (1989–present) surveys of university faculty.
A silver lining: Students voting with their feet
While the resulting ideological monoculture and intellectual echo chamber reflect poorly on the quality and rigor of college instruction in many disciplines, there’s a silver lining to this cloud: Students are increasingly rejecting these politicized fields when choosing majors.3
It turns out the most ideologically biased subject areas are having the greatest difficulty in attracting new majors.
Faculty in declining subject areas bemoan the alleged devaluation of the liberal arts, blaming “neoliberal capitalism” and an emphasis on practical jobs training to explain why students resoundingly reject their disciplines. They would do better to look inward and consider the possibility that embracing socialist activism in place of scholarship is driving students away. Even in the skewed and ideologically distorted academic marketplace of ideas, the student-consumers of classroom content still reign supreme. So it’s possible the recent “surge” in favorable views for socialism could, in fact, reflect a ceiling of support, rather than an unstoppable upward trend.
If that’s the case, organizations and publications devoted to the cause of individual freedom should continue educating Americans about the value of core political and economic concepts like capitalism, economic liberty, private property rights, and free markets. The best way to counter the spread of socialism’s destructive and ruinous ideas is to provide superior ideas that help people navigate the political discussion.
3Political skew score by discipline calculated from Mitchell Langbert, “Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty,” Academic Questions 31.2 (2018): 186–197. Trends in majors reported in Benjamin M. Schmidt, “The History BA since the Great Recession,” Perspectives on History, December 2018.
