by Matthew Buckley, Craig Garthwaite, and Jacob Oslick
Campus speakers are an everyday part of student life. Nearly every day, a campus group of some sort hosts a speaker to discuss topics of importance to university life. From affirmative action to issues of fiscal policy, the opportunity to speak at the University draws an array of some the nation's top intellectual talent.
Yet does this influx of opinion and views slant one way? Amongst students, recent studies indicate that while certain conservative opinions regarding social issues are rising, the typical college student is left-of-center. Here at U-M, students pride themselves on social activism and political awareness. Yet how cosmopolitan and diverse are the speakers we bring to campus? Do our speakers give us a more nuanced view of the world?
To investigate these questions, three Review staff members examined the major speakers who have come to campus over the '95-'96 and '96-'97 school years. Using the Michigan Daily's Internet archives, we surveyed the speakers who have come to campus, to get a feel for exactly what the trends were in their political positions. The results should come as no surprise. Over the course of the two studied years, speakers recorded tended to be of a left-of-center persuasion over 75% of the time.
Perhaps also not surprising was the huge leap in speakers, and a moderation of the leftward tilt, in the months before the 1996 election. From the beginning of the fall 1996 term until the early November election, there were some 35 recorded speeches given by various political candidates and activists, with just over 70 percent of the speeches tending leftward. Appearances by several Republican politicians pushed the tendency of the speakers to the right by a small margin, as Joe Fitzsimmons, Mike Bishop, and Ingrid Sheldon (GOP members in contests for US Representative, U-M Regent, and Ann Arbor mayor, respectively) all spoke to students.
Some methodological notes should be noted. The work was certainly not fail-safe, but should still provide some grounds for conclusions. The Michigan Daily's reporters cover campus events and report them, including most of the major speakers who come to campus. These stories can be located in their archives, accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web. With the Daily's on-line archives going back two years, we used that time as our cut-off.
From there, we went day by day through the archives, looking for speakers. Once we found a speaker, we read the story for content to determine the political position of the speaker. If the speaker's speech was not politically controversial, we did not count the speech. If the speech did have political content, it was marked according to the political view expressed as "tending liberal" or "tending conservative." From this analysis, then, 77 percent of the speakers surveyed tended liberal.
We dealt in a somewhat arbitrary fashion with several panels and forums. Examining the speakers, we tried to see if all speakers tended to align in the same direction. If they did, we lumped the whole event as one "speaker" and coded it appropriately. If there were conflicting alignments present, we counted the event as one speaker for both alignments. We did this to avoid problems of large panels of either political affiliation coming to campus and "swamping" the results.
We did this for speakers covered by Daily reporters, not for AP stories. Admittedly, this led to the inclusion of several speeches covered by Daily reporters that were not on the U-M campus. These speeches, however, did cut both ways: both presidential contenders in 1996 spoke in Detroit before the election, as did vice-president Al Gore. Republican Governor John Engler also made the list for an off-campus appearance. With the potential for campus groups to have visited these speeches, we did not want to cut them out of the sample. In either case, their inclusion or exclusion does not significantly affect the results.
We should finally note that we were limited to what the Daily covered. This should not prove a barrier to any conclusions. Certainly, there are many right-leaning speakers missed by the Daily, as the College Libertarians, Objectivists, and others do have speakers. However, again, if compared to potential leftward=leaning speakers, the potential problems here are minimized. While the Daily may not cover lots of speeches by several smaller rightward-leaning groups, it also rarely covers meetings by many leftward-leaning political groups on campus. This is only natural; the Daily, like other groups, has limited resources and must prioritize what it will cover.
Why might this slant be taking place? It certainly has something to do with the campus as a whole. "I think that if you did an analysis of the campus and its political leanings, you would find a liberal bias, therefore it would follow that it is more likely that these leftlike tendencies would bring in speakers of their interest," MSA President Mike Nagrant noted.
With student groups often working under serious financial constraints, getting a speaker can be very difficult. Speakers often require a significant financial investment, with travel expenses and room accommodations often accompanying some nominal speaker fee. For student groups with limited resources, assembling an ideologically diverse group to discuss issues is often financially impossible. Securing one speaker is itself a laudable feat.
What this suggests is that far from a vile conspiracy to blanch out conservatism on campus, the trend to liberal speakers is a throwback to supply and demand. Given scarce resources, leftward-leaning campuses with any sort of proportional distribution of those resources will find that more resources head to leftward-leaning groups. With those resources being crucial to securing speakers, then, it makes sense that most speakers do espouse liberal viewpoints like those of the student body. Far from some administration attempt to quash the right, the observed result is simply a fact of numbers.
Yet does the affiliation of speakers even matter? Certainly, it would be ridiculous to argue that students change their minds in large part due to campus speakers. Alternate possibilities seem more compelling. The leftward trend of speakers may have "an impact on those who are already on the left side of the spectrum as a reinforcement of belief mechanism," Nagrant said. Having a viewpoint and hearing field experts who share that view may lead people to further entrenchment in their own beliefs.
Yet even if speakers do nothing to change people's minds, could they still be harmful? Campus conservatives claim that they can. College Republican President Mark Potts notes "the effect of campus speakers being for the most part liberal is detrimental to a University atmosphere that attempts to foster constructive and balanced thought and debate." By not showcasing sufficient alternate viewpoints, the dominant liberal voice among college speakers "skews academic discussion and inhibits the constructive discussion of so many issues," Potts noted.
The trick of such balance will occupy campus student government over the next few weeks over the crucial issue of affirmative action. MSA will be working in the next few weeks to put together a symposium next month to increase student awareness of both sides of the affirmative action debate. In order to have a symposium worthy of the name, there will have to be serious and substantive input from both sides. In various emails to campus groups, MSA members have already begun soliciting student input.
Yet looking at campus speakers in the same mention as affirmative action brings up all kinds of possible inconsistencies. Liberals in general tend to favor affirmative action, claiming that it is unjust to have various minority groups represented in the campus setting at proportions lower than they exist in the general population. Yet when leftward-leaning speakers dominate campus speaking opportunities, there is very little worry expressed. Conservatives fare little better in the argument, since their dilemma is the inverse. In arguing that only the most academically qualified get in without concern for race, they claim that numerical targets should be irrelevant. Yet a common complaint by conservatives about campuses is the strong number of liberal influences, including speakers, relative to the strength of those influences in the general population. It often seems that conservatives wish for something like conservative "quotas."
Yet students need to be aware of this leftward slant amongst speakers since they subsidize it. The administration receives money through tuition; MSA (and consequently, student groups that rely upon MSA for funding) receives money from student fees. For MSA, the funding is direct: student money goes directly into student groups that support speakers. With the administration, student tuition bills are but a large part of incoming monies due to the input of alumnae donations and other sources of revenue. However, in the end students pay for whom the campus hears, whether funded by the administration or by campus groups.
The solution to the problem, if one is a conservative, seems to be a return to grassroots campus organization. If the problem is one of too few groups sponsoring conservative speakers, then the obvious solution is to get more people involved and hold more conservative speeches. The College Republicans and College Libertarians, for example, have been active in securing speakers even though they are the campus minority. More work by others on the right may pay off similar dividends, pushing that 77 percent leftward mark down to something closer to the consensus of the general population.