In a recent essay for Heterodox STEM, James Shuls lays out “Five Rules for Conservative Faculty in a Liberal Academy,” drawn from his experience earning tenure and serving as department chair at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, where he was the only openly conservative faculty member in his college. He advises: be collegial until it matters not to be; pick your battles; produce strong scholarship; use service strategically; and build networks both inside and outside academia.

That advice assumes a system where merit still governs outcomes. In many private institutions, it does not. A University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty survey found that 70 percent identify as liberal, compared to just nine percent as conservative, with faculty up to 38 percentage points more likely to penalize conservative job candidates.

Shuls’s framework may work in large public universities with institutional constraints, but it is less convincing in environments where those constraints are weak and ideological conformity carries greater weight.

Why Private Institutions Are a Different Game

Public colleges and universities operate under sunshine laws and state legislative oversight. Faculty often have First Amendment protections, union contracts, and post-tenure review standards that are procedurally legible. When a standard shifts, there is usually a paper trail.

Private colleges operate under none of these constraints. No sunshine laws. No electoral accountability. No external check. Instead, administrative decisions are shielded by confidentiality norms. Faculty governance, where it exists, is advisory. “Mission alignment”—undefined and unchecked—can justify almost any personnel decision.

In private institutions, informal culture is the governance structure. Norms do the work that rules do elsewhere. And norms, unlike rules, cannot be appealed.

The World Many Faculty Actually Live In

Discipline in private institutions does not operate through rules. It operates through accumulation: a grant opportunity that never materializes, a collaborative project you are no longer invited into, a teaching schedule that becomes less desirable, a review letter that shifts in tone without explanation. No single act is decisive. Over time, the signals compound.

“Collegiality” becomes the key mechanism—elastic enough to absorb disagreement, flexible enough to justify exclusion. The AAUP warned as early as 1999 that the term has “not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm.”

Tenure and promotion files do not speak for themselves. They are interpreted—and those interpretations are shaped by perception, reputation, and perceived alignment. The system does not need to punish dissent. It can simply outlast it.

Where Shuls’s Rules Meet Structural Reality

Each of his rules runs into friction at private institutions. Being nice presupposes that the moment to stop is legible. In many private colleges, costs accumulate before any such moment arrives. There is no single hill—only a slow narrowing of options, where niceness becomes the expectation and even mild deviation is read as disruption.

Picking battles still carries reputational consequences that compound across a tenure file. Doing good work matters less when “holistic” review replaces measurable output—when a syllabus can be read as “rigorous” or “provocative” depending on who is doing the reading.

Service builds networks only where culture allows it. In tightly networked private colleges, it can instead expose, where colleagues agree privately but remain silent publicly.

Shuls’s strongest point—preserve optionality—does translate. But building a network requires early exposure, and early exposure carries the very risks that his rules are meant to manage.

From Disagreement to Deviance

Disagreement is no longer reliably treated as a contribution to inquiry. It is increasingly read as a signal of misalignment. Disagreement becomes discomfort; discomfort becomes distrust; distrust becomes exclusion.

In this environment, signaling becomes central—not only what you say, but what you affirm, endorse, and decline to perform. Silence is no longer neutral. It is legible—and often suspect.

What More Honest Guidance Would Look Like

For faculty in private institutions, Shuls’s rules need to be supplemented. Read the institution before you test it—culture reveals itself in patterns, not statements. Protect optionality early, before your file becomes an interpretation shaped by others. Distinguish teaching rigor from public exposure: you can assign difficult texts and model pluralism without making yourself the focal point. Document everything—in an interpretive system, evidence is protection.

And name what you are doing. Strategic restraint in a private institution is not a failure of principle. It is a recognition of structural constraint. There is a difference between refusing to think and choosing when to speak. Name it clearly, so you do not mistake endurance for defeat—or defeat for endurance.

Even this may not be enough. These are survival strategies, not solutions.

The Structural Problem We Are Avoiding

The deeper limitation of Shuls’s framework—and of most individual-behavior advice—is not that it is wrong. It is that it places too much weight on individual strategy and too little on institutional design.

Colleges and universities are not neutral containers. They are systems of incentives. In many private institutions, those incentives reward alignment and penalize deviation.

When that is the structure, a better individual strategy is not the answer. Structural accountability is: boards that treat viewpoint diversity as a fiduciary responsibility, accreditors willing to name ideological monoculture as an institutional failure, and donors willing to ask harder questions before writing the check.

Shuls is right that conservative faculty should not hide. His own career shows that discipline and excellence can prevail—at a public university, with institutional backstops that public employment provides. But consider what his advice requires: courage, consistency, thick skin, a long time horizon, and the willingness to be the only openly conservative voice in the room.

FIRE’s 2024 Faculty Survey found that 35 percent of faculty members are already toning down their written work for fear of controversy—a rate four times higher than during the McCarthy era.

This is not a courage deficit. It is a structural incentive problem. Institutions calling for more courage from conservative faculty have no interest in making courage less costly. They will produce more silence—and call it agreement.