Good lord that was a lot of words that said very little.
I'll try to be more concise and take an actual position: there's no such thing as a leftward shift, it's just people adopting the good ideas and abandoning the bad ideas.
I've seen first hand many examples where leadership (within specific schools, probably with a highest concentration within liberal arts schools), consistently value the jobs of the faculty over the future wellbeing of the students. They don't value providing students with knowledge and skills that will make them successful in life after they graduate, and they do value growing their own staff and power within the organization. They value adding more rules and avoiding making any mistakes over taking risks and evolving the education to keep up with the rest of the world. Some of them value short-term benefits for themselves over long-term benefits of their students. I've seen this first hand on many occasions, so many it's beyond anecdote. It's not all bad, that's not my point, but to assume that all their judgement is perfect and they haven't made any mistakes and they have it all figured out and shouldn't reconsider anything... Well, that sounds more like faith and church to me. You're treating them like bishops not academics.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are schools and their professors perfect? Obviously not. Should they be improved? Sure. Is this trump driven ideological attack related to improving schools? Again, obviously not.
And I attempted to explain (steelman) why some people may feel that this is necessary. For the record I think that this government letter, the precedent for it, etc. are authoritarian, and I don't support it.
My point is that schools have drifted in the values they support, and distinctly away from politically right values (both the good ones and the bad ones), which has made America more fragile and led to an increase in authoritarianism. I am not condoning an authoritarian solution to the problem, but I am aware of and attempting to explain the problem, because I thought you were inviting an explanation.
Little did I know your "I don't understand" wasn't an expression of curiosity. This is a great example of expressing values, since I place a higher value on curiosity, and I guess you place a higher value on judgement?
I also disagree with your point that "schools have drifted in the values they support". It's probably more accurate to say the right wing has sprinted in the opposite direction of the typical values of a university.
I also don't think this has anything to do with a rise in authoritarianism, it's far more likely to attribute such a thing to fear and desperation, whether real or invoked by influencers for a specific reason.
A 2005 paper by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern found that in humanities and social sciences, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 10:1.
A 2016 study by Mitchell Langbert, Anthony Quain, and Daniel Klein updated this, showing Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratios as high as 17:1 in some disciplines (e.g., history, sociology).
STEM fields tend to be more balanced, but even there, the trend has leaned more left over time.
The HERI Faculty Survey (Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA) consistently reports increasing liberal identification among faculty since the 1980s.
In 1989: ~39% of faculty identified as "liberal" or "far left"
By 2017: ~60% identified that way
The National Association of Scholars and Pew Research have shown that students are also trending more liberal, particularly in elite institutions.
DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) offices have expanded dramatically:
A 2021 Heritage Foundation study found that DEI staff at major universities often outnumbered tenured history faculty.
Speech codes and bias response teams:
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has tracked increases in campus speech restrictions, often under the guise of protecting against offensive or harmful speech, typically aligned with progressive concerns.
Emergence and expansion of identity studies programs (e.g., gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies) reflect values that align with left-leaning critiques of power and hierarchy.
Declining requirements in Western Civilization or classical education in general education curricula, often replaced with more critical or globalized approaches.
A 2012 study in PS: Political Science & Politics reported that a majority of academic psychologists would discriminate against conservatives in hiring or grant review.
A 2020 paper by Honeycutt and Freberg showed similar bias in academic psychology departments.
Growing number of conservative-leaning donors (e.g., from the University of Chicago, Claremont Institute) have publicly criticized institutions for abandoning viewpoint diversity.
New initiatives such as the University of Austin (UATX) were launched explicitly as a reaction against perceived ideological conformity in mainstream academia.
The cumulative effect of these trends—political affiliation data, surveys, policy changes, curriculum developments, and institutional responses—strongly supports the claim that American universities have moved leftward over the past five decades. The change is most pronounced in the humanities and social sciences, and more muted in professional and STEM fields.
Viewpoints are essentially grounded in actions, and actions are grounded in values or ways of being.
Values are acted out by individuals and groups through a relative hierarchy, and generally guide which actions are taken.
People generally consider what's true to be what works, and what works is relative to what action is being taken, and what action is being taken depends on the persons underlying values.
Because almost all of the universities' leadership has shifted far to the left side of the US political spectrum over the last 50 years, there is now a hostile environment to many right leaning values. You can argue that this was natural and that right leaning values are worse, but that would be unwise. There is good and bad in everything, and it's not helpful to over generalize. The reality is that there are both "good" and "bad" values on both sides of the political bias, but even that is probably too generalized. What makes a value good or bad is contextual. Some values are more helpful in certain situations or environments than others.
Even more important is that values don't naturally exist on one spectrum... The idea of "right" and "left" values is artificial.
So while I agree that the constriction of values being supported within universities is unhealthy like a stool that's had three legs chopped off, the idea that top down authoritarian enforcement on these organizations is the solution is somewhat terrifying.
Scary times.