The urban legend held dear by many conservatives that liberal academics at universities routinely - indeed, systematically - indoctrinate their students with leftwing politics has been dismissed as myth by a sheaf of new studies just published.

Fresh research carried out in the US on America's universities has produced results purporting to show that students' politics are not formed by their tutors. Although American universities are indeed stuffed full of liberal and social democratic faculty, they do not try to turn their students into lefties, say the authors.

The new claims attempt to assuage the suspicions of conservatives - including many parents and politicians - who have long complained of brainwashing and bias on campus, even setting up bodies to monitor and expose alleged offenders.

Michael Barone, a fellow at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute, warns of a "liberal thugocracy" operating across the US varsity and extending into Barack Obama's political machine. He accuses liberals outside higher education of no less than taking their political "marching orders" from America's colleges and universities. "We are looking at an increasingly college-educated electorate and political campaign teams, so of course the liberal agenda comes through."

Three separate sets of new research now conclude that academics have virtually no impact on the ideology of their students.

One study is by a husband and wife team of political scientists, Matthew Woessner, a prominent conservative and registered Republican, and April Kelly-Woessner, a liberal and registered Democrat. "There is no evidence that a professor or lecturer's views instigate political change among students," says Woessner. He is the only conservative of the five academics he works most closely with at Penn State University in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and one of two conservatives out of the 20 who run his School of Public Affairs.

The couple's study will be published in PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, next spring, bolstering a similar study published this year in PS, of 7,000 students and 38 institutions across the US, which drew largely the same conclusion.

The authors do not deny that the majority of academics are left of centre, and that many of them reveal their politics to students. "But that is different from indoctrinating them with it," says Kelly-Woessner, who works at nearby Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

Their survey showed that students' politics did shift at university, mostly towards the centre or slightly left. But those who shifted left did not necessarily have left-leaning professors, they claim; the change was more connected to their peers and what was going on outside the classroom. Three earlier studies by the couple have produced similar conclusions.

Brainwashing fantasies

"In this one, we concentrated on political science classes - where you would think that politics would be most likely to rear its head and where only one in four faculty are Republican - and we still did not find indoctrination," says Kelly-Woessner. In fact, she believes that lecturers who try to convert their students are more likely to see a backlash than compliance.

George Mason University public policy professor Lee Fritschler and co-authors Jeremy Mayer and Bruce Smith have just published Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities, in which they claim that the notion of students being turned left by the lecturers is "a fantasy". They cite age as the bigger factor, with Mayer concluding that "it is hard to change the mind of anyone over 15".

And Mack Mariani at Xavier University, Ohio, and Gordon Hewitt at Hamilton College, New York, write in PS of their latest research at US colleges, which found that: "Student political orientation does not change for a majority of students while in college, and for those that do change there is evidence that other factors have an effect on that change, such as gender and socio-economic status."

Woessner says the research contradicts the enduring belief of many conservative observers that academics not only try to infuse their classes with their views but "systematically" indoctrinate college students. Barone argues: "Some of it is conscious, some of it is unconscious, and it often takes the form where anything but liberal ideas are disapproved of. This can affect faculty, too. I know academics who never revealed they were Republicans until after they got tenure."

He excoriates what he calls the "liberal thugocracy" for institutionalising political correctness, which he claims is not only designed to liberalise conservative students but kills debate. "Campuses that once prided themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society," he says.

During the administration of George Bush, Republican-led bills in several states called for an "academic bill of rights" designed to counter perceived political bias and student brainwashing in liberal arts colleges across America. Florida, Colorado, Utah, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California were among the states where such legislation was either discussed or proposed. Although laws were not passed, some institutions in these states entered into voluntary contracts to adopt such bills of rights, pledging academic freedom and intellectual diversity, and promising not to encourage leftwing politics over right among their students and not to tolerate hostility to conservative students' beliefs.

Public debate was stimulated to such an extent that last year the American Association of University Professors issued a policy supplementing higher education's 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The new statement acknowledged the need for measurable "balance" in courses, and advised that professors stay close to an agreed syllabus and avoid political references unless clearly related to course content.

Academic spies

In 2006, most academics at the University of California Los Angeles were horrified when a conservative group began offering students money to tape lectures and turn over materials distributed by professors who they felt focused more on political issues than their course subjects. UCLA student Ben Shapiro had previously caused uproar when he wrote a book, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, in 2004, accusing faculty of evangelising their liberal politics. The book claimed that only 9% of Ivy League academics vote Republican.

"I'm a conservative who studied political science at UCLA at around the same time, and I have no idea what Shapiro was talking about," says Woessner.

But the UCLA pay-to-spy body followed similar (non-paying) monitoring bodies set up at other institutions - and the creation in 2002 of Campus Watch. Campus Watch was set up as a forum to report perceived anti-Israeli bias in Middle Eastern studies on US campuses. But it is also a forum for reporting "the mixing of politics with scholarship" and submitting material used to build dossiers against academics and institutions accused of proselytising.

Kelly-Woessner says the issue is less one of indoctrination and more one of students engaging in diverse debate. "Liberal students lose out if they are not being exposed to other points of view and the workings of conservative minds," she says.

The twist, points out Fritschler, is that fears of being accused of indoctrination have led to a disengagement from civic and political affairs and discouragement of debate. The problem now, he fears, is: "Not too much politics, but too little."

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