[This is our second post on how to choose a college with viewpoint diversity. See our first post here]

Heterodox Academy is working on a college guide so that students and parents can identify schools with enough viewpoint diversity to permit political dissent and debate. Our guide will eventually collect systematic data based on surveys and faculty political donations. But for those who can’t wait, a resource is already available that can help them evaluate the political climate on many college campuses.

Since 1998 the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has published a guide, Choosing the Right College, that evaluates colleges based on cost, curriculum, and political climate. Founded in 1953 (William F. Buckley was its first president), ISI has served as a conservative counterweight to campus leftism. Like Buckley’s National Review, ISI has been a fusionist institution seeking to harmonize social conservatism and economic libertarianism. But progressives will benefit from the guide too – viewpoint diversity is good for everyone. Very few schools lean right, so the ISI guide can help everyone find left-leaning schools that are not oppressively orthodox.

In Choosing the Right College, ISI offers a survey of 148 colleges for those who share its concerns about higher education. It is designed to help conservatives, students of faith, and anyone else desiring a traditional liberal arts education identify and avoid “problems endemic at many schools.” These problems include in their words:

• “Colleges are too expensive.”
• “Universities emphasize research at the expense of teaching. “
• “Too many college majors fail to offer a real education.”
• “Many college dorms are unsanitary hellholes or sinkholes of booze and vice.”
• “At some schools, teachers or administrators try to bully or indoctrinate students into towing a narrow, ‘politically correct’ line on intellectual, moral, and religious issues.”

Colleges, ISI warns, often increase tuition to pay for “salaries for useless administrators (‘diversity’ consultants and sports media flacks),” outsource teaching to graduate assistants, offer no meaningful core curriculum, and emphasize a party culture not conducive for serious study. In addition to evaluating elite universities and liberal arts colleges, ISI identifies “Blue Collar Ivies” and smaller, typically religious schools that it believes offer the best value, emphasize teaching, and provide options for students who want to avoid the “substance abuse” and “hookup culture” in many dorms.

To measure the academic seriousness of an institution, ISI examined the faculty and course offerings in three departments, English, History, and Political Science. In English, it looked for that classes focusing on great authors in the western literary tradition but without an emphasis on trendy and politicized literary theories. “Avoid,” ISI urges, “classes that mention ‘race,’ ‘class,’ or ‘gender.’” In short, study Chaucer and Shakespeare but leave the “fecopoetics” and deconstructionism behind. History departments should require classes that cover more than post-1965 American protest movements. And Political Science departments should require courses in classical political philosophy and the U.S. Constitution. If a department’s course offerings are skewed toward “Marxist meta-analysis of postcolonial Asia,” students should look elsewhere.

For Heterodox Academy readers, ISI’s evaluations of campus politics will be the most interesting parts of the guide. To help readers navigate this “political atmosphere,” the guide rates each school with a red, yellow, or green light. Receiving a red light means that a school is an unsafe zone particularly for religious students and political conservatives. A yellow light means be careful. And a green light means that a school is generally safe for intellectual minorities. Schools receiving a red light typically have a record of suppressing conservative and religious voices, imposing campus speech codes, implementing anonymous bias reporting systems, and restricting the ability of conservative and religious groups to organize. To supplement these measures, ISI asked its network of students and faculty to provide evaluations of their home institution. Among ISI’s worst offenders were many of the schools that have recently been rocked by campus protests; the University of Missouri, Amherst College, Wesleyan University, and Vanderbilt University.

ISI is particularly concerned with vague speech codes that turn campus politics into a tyranny of emotions. Often relying on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education invaluable ratings of university speech policies, ISI advises students to avoid institutions where they can be hauled up on harassment charges merely for offering ideas that offend the feelings of tender students unaccustomed to anyone disagreeing with them.

The University of Missouri is a good example. Considering the recent protests, ISI’s red light for the campus looks prescient. “Don’t even think about name-calling at Mizzou. Or sending off-color texts or Facebook postings,” ISI warns. “You could get reported to the Equity Office through the much-advertised “See It, Hear It, Report It” initiative that encourages students—with abundant flyers around the school and on the university’s website—to report any incident of bias.” One pro-life student told ISI, “I feel shunned and unwelcome. Students can be extremely cruel.”

ISI’s yellow light for Yale also looks more accurate in light of the recent attacks on Nicholas and Erika Christakis. While ISI concludes that with its “Sex Week” and generally libertine culture, Yale is “a microcosm of America’s degenerating social elite,” the political climate was not as bad as it could have been “Most intolerance,” ISI reports, “faced by conservatives on campus seems to originate with students, who are quick to ostracize outspoken traditionalists.” It was, after all, the Christakises who defended free speech and advised students to not be so quick to take offense.

So overall how many schools make the political grade for ISI? Of the 148 schools evaluated, 21 received a red light, 53 a yellow light, and 74 a green light. Those numbers are skewed, however, since ISI intentionally selected many schools such as Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and Thomas Aquinas College that it knows are more welcoming to conservative students. The guide is, after all, supposed to be a resource for conservatives. A random selection of schools would certainly have led ISI to give a lower percentage of green lights. ISI also acknowledges that many conservative schools would not be particularly comfortable for liberal students. A self-identified progressive atheist or a student looking to party would not find Patrick Henry College or Ave Maria University the place to enroll. Then again, there is no shortage of schools for partiers or progressives.

Many of the schools given a green light by ISI are not private, distinctly religious schools. Almost half are public universities such as Florida State University, and the Universities of Virginia, Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, and Connecticut. But reinforcing what Jon Shields and I found in our research for Passing on the Right, a disproportionate number of green light schools, both public and private, are located in the South.

While one could criticize Choosing the Right College for missing some pockets of political diversity (Missouri’s Political Science department happens to have a number of conservatives) or not evaluating more disciplines or schools, overall the guide provides a valuable analysis of campus life from a conservative perspective. In fact, the guide’s greatest weakness is that ISI is not going to publish it after 2015. We hope that another organization will take over the project. (Note: FIRE will continue its speech code ratings.)

In the meantime, at Heterodox Academy we will work to provide additional measures to help provide a more comprehensive picture of intellectual diversity in higher education.

Here are the ISI ratings.

Red Light Schools

1. Amherst College

2. Barnard College

3. Bryn Mawr College

4. Bucknell University

5. College of the Holy Cross

6. Duke University

7. Georgia Institute of Technology

8. Grinnell College

9. Indiana University– Bloomington

10. Mount Holyoke College

11. Oberlin College

12. Rutgers University

13. Smith College

14. University of Massachusetts—Amherst

15. University of Missouri

16. University of Oregon

17. University of Rhode Island

18. University of Vermont

19. Vanderbilt University

20. Vassar College

21. Wesleyan University

Yellow Light Schools

1. Bates College

2. Berea College

3. Bowdoin College

4. Brandeis University

5. Brooklyn College

6. Brown University

7. Centre College

8. Colby College

9. Colgate University

10. Columbia University

11. Cornell University

12. Dartmouth College

13. Emory University

14. Fordham University

15. Georgetown University

16. Harvard University

17. Johns Hopkins University

18. Kenyon College

19. Middlebury College

20. New York University

21. Northwestern University

22. Ohio State University

23. Pennsylvania State University

24. Providence College

25. Rice University

26. Sarah Lawrence College

27. Stanford University

28. Swarthmore College

29. Temple University

30. Tufts University

31. University of Arizona

32. University of Arkansas

33. University of California Berkeley

34. University of California—Los Angeles

35. University of Colorado-Boulder

36. University of Delaware

37. University of Hawaii—Manoa

38. University of Idaho

39. University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign

40. University of Iowa

41. University of Minnesota—Twin Cities

42. University of North Dakota

43. University of Notre Dame

44. University of Pennsylvania

45. University of Southern California

46. University of Texas—Austin

47. University of Washington

48. University of Wisconsin—Madison

49. Wellesley College

50. Wheaton College

51. Whitman College

52. Williams College

53. Yale University

Green Light Schools

1. Alice Lloyd College

2. Auburn University

3. Ave Maria University

4. Baylor University

5. Belmont Abbey College

6. Berry College

7. Boston College

8. Boston University

9. California Institute of Technology

10. Carnegie Mellon University

11. Catholic University of America

12. Christendom College

13. Claremont Colleges

14. College of Charleston

15. College of the Ozarks

16. College of William and Mary

17. Cooper Union

18. Florida State University

19. George Mason University

20. Gordon College

21. Grove City College

22. Hampden Sydney College

23. Haverford University

24. Hillsdale College

25. Louisiana State University

26. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

27. North Carolina State University

28. Patrick Henry College

29. Pepperdine University

30. Princeton University

31. Seton Hall University

32. Southern Methodist University

33. St. John’s College

34. State University of New York—Binghamton

35. Texas A&M University

36. The King’s College

37. Thomas Aquinas College

38. Tulane University

39. United States Air Force Academy

40. United States Military Academy

41. United States Naval Academy

42. University of Alabama

43. University of Alaska

44. University of California—Santa Barbara

45. University of Chicago

46. University of Connecticut

47. University of Dallas

48. University of Florida

49. University of Georgia

50. University of Kansas

51. University of Kentucky

52. University of Maine

53. University of Maryland

54. University of Michigan

55. University of Mississippi

56. University of Montana

57. University of Nebraska—Lincoln

58. University of Nevada

59. University of New Hampshire

60. University of New Mexico

61. University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill

62. University of Oklahoma

63. University of South Dakota

64. University of Tennessee

65. University of the South

66. University of Utah

67. University of Virginia

68. University of Wyoming

69. Villanova University

70. Wabash College

71. Wake Forest University

72. Washington and Lee University

73. Washington University in St. Louis

74. West Virginia University