ANALYSIS: Conservative academics say progressive bias is still a huge problem in higher education
Give any indication that you might be conservative – attending a Catholic college, for example – and there’s a chance you won’t get hired as a professor.
That’s what happened to one scholar at an unnamed university, according to a story related by a University of North Carolina professor recently on X.
David Decosimo, associate dean and philosophy professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill, shared the case as a reminder that bias against conservative scholars is still a huge problem in higher education.
“Academia has blatantly discriminated against conservatives for years, peaking over the last ten. If we somehow got a job, progs would do almost anything to cancel us,” he wrote Monday.
Without naming names, Decosimo related a situation at a university where a qualified applicant was rejected due to the possibility that he “might” oppose abortion.
“A search committee unanimously recommended a candidate for a jr position. He had outstanding credentials & publications – far above the pool. In the department vote, a professor objected that he’d gone to a Catholic college for undergrad before his Ivy PhD,” he wrote.
She said that since he’d gone to that Catholic college he was likely pro-life & thus didn’t belong in the department. She got a majority to vote with her. They preferred a failed search & the risk of losing a line over hiring a generational scholar who *might* have been pro-life.
— David Decosimo (@DavidDecosimo) June 9, 2025
“This was in philosophy, which may be the least ideologically corrupt humanities discipline,” Decosimo said.
He wrote the post in response to a New York Times article about a progressive professor at Muhlenberg College who says she was fired for “pro-Palestinian speech.”
Decosimo said Professor Maura Finkelstein should not have lost her job just for saying “anti-Zionist things,” but neither should professors who espouse conservative beliefs.
“… this stuff has been far, far more severe & pervasive against those of us not on the left for years. NYT & elites were happy with that. Worse, our own colleagues have been silent & complicit,” he wrote.
Princeton University’s vocal conservative Professor Robert George also confirmed this, writing on X that Decosimo “is right, alas.”
The College Fix has been documenting evidence of this bias for 15 years now.
Last year, for example, The Fix reported how an academic journal rejected an article about abortion that it initially accepted, citing concerns about the author being a “white” “male” who supports the pro-life position.
Similarly, a former Johns Hopkins University faculty member who now works for the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute sued Sage Journals for retracting three articles due to what he described as “blatant double standards.”
Other College Fix analyses have found huge political imbalances among university faculty, including in red states like Georgia and Florida, as well as in departments like math and engineering that are thought to be less politicized.
Then, there is The Fix’s Cancel Culture Database, which tracks even more instances of bias. Entries this year include a Harvard faculty chair saying professors should be fired if they oppose “gender-affirming care” and UCLA students protesting a scholar for opposing race-based admissions practices.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A hand holds a plastic fetal model; Maria Oswalt/Unsplash