The disparities on campus between the percentages of liberal and conservative professors is well-documented, but the effects of this disparity are still in dispute. In principle, it is possible that leftist professors are teaching (in a fair-minded way) important authors and books that are associated with the traditions of classical liberalism, conservativism, and libertarianism. The National Association of Scholars has embarked on a project to find out whether this is so. We are assembling representive lists of writers (contemporary and older, mostly political theorists) who can be unambiguously assigned to a particular tradition. We then want to find out how often these writers show up as assigned reading in undergraduate college courses.
The success of the project depends in part on having lists of writers (or books) that virtually everyone would agree are correctly categorized. So we have to exclude authors who bridge traditions or who are claimed as contributing to more than one line of developing thought. We also want to be above reproach in building lists of authors and works of comparable importance in their respective traditions. The final lists may include both high-brow and mass-market authors, as long as they are suitable for college curricula, and provided the mix is the same in all categories.
We need help with this. Who are the key authors and what are the key books in the liberal, conservative, libertarian, and radical traditions? The rules are that the authors or books must (A) unambiguously represent different strands of political theory, (B) be widely recognized, and (C) be plausible material for undergraduate courses. We are interested in contemporary books as well as older works, but nothing published before 1750. Our goal is to compile lists of ten books in each category that all sides would agree are a fair sample of these political traditions.
John Rawls, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, J. S. Mill, J.-J. Rousseau, Howard Zinn, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, Paulo Freire, C. Wright Mills, Ludwig von Mises, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, Albert Jay Nock, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Alasdair MacIntyre, William F. Buckley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Taylor, F.A. Hayek . . . Who is missing?
If you would like to help, go to the NAS website to post your answer, or send an e-mail to nasonweb@nas.org.