ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 “Introduction” presents the major issue of the book which is the potential political bias on conservative Protestant campuses. We first look at the dominance of progressive political thought among American faculty members. We then explore theories about why faculty members tend to be political progressives. Those theories involved professors’ position in the class structure, the political effects of higher education, differences among liberals and conservatives on certain values, personality and cognitive factors; and finally reputation-based political self-selection. Then we look at the empirical evidence of political bias and political tolerance within academia, arguing that the evidence for bias is greater. We speculate that this dynamic may be different for conservative Protestant campuses. We end the chapter with a summary of the rest of the chapters.
