Drawing on data collected in a specially commissioned public opinion survey as well as other recent research on higher education, Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner, create an incredibly readable presentation of both the similarities and differences between those running our universities and those attending them. The authors manage to remain impressively neutral; instead they give us a fuller perspective of the people on our college campuses.

Despite assumptions in some quarters of widespread academic radicalism, professors are politically liberal but on the whole democratically tolerant and are focused more on the business of research and teaching than on trying to change the world. Professors and Their Politics tackles the assumption that universities are ivory towers of radicalism with the potential to corrupt conservative youth. Neil Gross and Solon Simmons gather the work of leading sociologists, historians, and other researchers interested in the relationship between politics and higher education to present evidence to the contrary. In eleven meaty chapters, contributors describe the political makeup of American academia today, consider the causes of its liberal tilt, discuss the college experience for politically conservative students, and delve into historical debates about professorial politics. Offering readable, rigorous analyses rather than polemics, Professors and Their Politics yields important new insights into the nature of higher education institutions while challenging dogmas of both the left and the right.

Liberals represent a large majority of American faculty, especially in the social sciences and humanities. Does minority status affect the work of conservative scholars or the academy as a whole? In Passing on the Right, Dunn and Shields explore the actual experiences of conservative academics, examining how they navigate their sometimes hostile professional worlds. Offering a nuanced picture of this political minority, this book will engage academics and general readers on both sides of the political spectrum.

In 2003, David Horowitz began a campaign to promote intellectual diversity and a return to academic standards in American universities. To achieve these goals he devised an "Academic Bill of Rights" and launched a national student movement with chapters on 160 college campuses. His efforts have led to the passage of an Academic Bill of Rights by student governments from Montana to Maine; have inspired the adoption of student-specific academic freedom rights at Temple University and Penn State; and have dramatically transformed the national debate on academic issues.

Why we don't live in a post-truth society but rather a myside society: what science tells us about the bias that poisons our politics. In The Bias That Divides Us, psychologist Keith Stanovich argues provocatively that we don't live in a post-truth society, as has been claimed, but rather a myside society. Our problem is not that we are unable to value and respect truth and facts, but that we are unable to agree on commonly accepted truth and facts. We believe that our side knows the truth. Post-truth? That describes the other side. The inevitable result is political polarization. Stanovich shows what science can tell us about myside bias: how common it is, how to avoid it, and what purposes it serves. Stanovich explains that although myside bias is ubiquitous, it is an outlier among cognitive biases. It is unpredictable. Intelligence does not inoculate against it, and myside bias in one domain is not a good indicator of bias shown in any other domain. Stanovich argues that because of its outlier status, myside bias creates a true blind spot among the cognitive elite--those who are high in intelligence, executive functioning, or other valued psychological dispositions. They may consider themselves unbiased and purely rational in their thinking, but in fact they are just as biased as everyone else. Stanovich investigates how this bias blind spot contributes to our current ideologically polarized politics, connecting it to another recent trend: the decline of trust in university research as a disinterested arbiter.

Political correctness if one of the primary enemies of freedom of thought in higher education today, undermining our ability to acquire, transmit, and process knowledge. Political correctness limits the variation of ideas by an ideologically driven concern for hue rather than view. This volume is not simply another rant; there are good data here, along with well-crafted, hard-to-ignore logical interpretations and arguments. It is the sort of work that those who adhere to idea-limiting notions of the university will try to trivialize. That alone should make it important reading. --Michael Schwartz, president emeritus, Kent State University and Cleveland State University

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.