My favorite political science professor was a committed progressive who was scrupulously fair and supportive despite our substantial differences. I loved a literature class I'd had with an old-school Catholic socialist who gamely signed my petition to get Ron Paul on the primary ballot though he never would have dreamed of voting for him or any Republican at all.
My experience of left-wing academia had been entirely positive. Yet I also remembered the results of research I did at school. I had attended a campus dinner where a professor said that during the election, our school's faculty split almost evenly between the two major parties, but by , they swung heavily Democratic. With my adviser's help, I polled the whole faculty seeking to determine if this shift really happened, whether the trend continued into , and what causal or correlative factors might be involved, like age, academic discipline, or opposition to the war in Iraq.
I won't bore you with the details — suffice it to say, there was a shift, though not as dramatic as I'd heard, and the biggest gains went not to the Democratic Party but to independent and third-party votes. Across all the years I studied, our faculty leaned further left than the local population, and left-of-center views were particularly common in the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences, where political subjects are most likely to enter class discussion.
My school was not unique in this regard. On this the academic literature was clear. And so, I reasoned at CRO, if there were professors putting ideology above pedagogy, it was statistically likely that the scenario would be as CRO's rating function warned, with conservative or libertarian students suffering the bias of a progressive teacher. Plus, I figured, if we encountered a situation with the ideological roles reversed, that could go in the ratings, too.
But I was wrong. And the reason, I think, is pretty simple: Most professors are not trying to indoctrinate their students in a sort of vast left-wing conspiracy. Yes, most academics, especially in the soft disciplines, are far from conservative.
That doesn't mean they have any intent of forcing their students to think as they do. In fact, good teachers will do exactly the opposite, challenging and debating their students — maybe even attempting to persuade them — but never abusing their position to demand ideological conformity.
Honestly, many professors are so desperate for constructive student participation that they'll be delighted by any thoughtful engagement, even by students with whom they have serious political differences. That CRO's professor rating system never took off is a good thing for all sides: It means the egregious cases of professorial misconduct that make the news are unusual.
We didn't have students battering down our digital door with stories of unethical professors suppressing students' academic freedom because there aren't that many of these incidents — and when they do happen, people already take notice, just as they should. This means a national search has turned up about documented cases of, as the site puts it, "college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda Yet a little digging into the reports suggests many others are not exactly serious violations of student rights.
The sole story from my graduate alma mater, for example, is an account of hard feelings between a Native American professor and a student who wore a Blackhawks sweatshirt to class.
Leading the charge is David Horowitz , a former student leftist who is now president of the right-leaning Center for the Study of Popular Culture. According to Horowitz, there has been a "successful and pervasive blacklist of conservatives on American college campuses," that can only be rectified by the intervention of state legislatures and boards of trustees.
He has called for an "Academic Bill of Rights" to protect the interests of conservative faculty and students. Other conservatives make similar claims. Thomas Reeves of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute , for example, has insisted that "conservatives are discriminated against routinely and deliberately" in faculty hiring, making some well-qualified candidates virtually "unemployable" on respected campuses.
These are odd arguments to hear from conservatives, since they usually deny that disproportionate statistics can be taken as proof of discrimination. When it comes to employment discrimination or affirmative action, conservatives will blithely insist that the absence of minorities in a workforce or student body simply means that there were too few "qualified applicants" from a particular group.
And don't bother talking to them about a "glass ceiling" or "mommy track" that impedes women's careers. That's not discrimination, they say, it's "self-selection. Conservatives abandon these arguments, however, when it comes to their own prospects in academe. A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.
Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party? Conservatives have a ready answer.
The only reason faculties lean so far to the left is that deans, administrators and entire university cultures systematically discriminate against conservatives. Mostly, they assume that the leftward tilt is prima facie evidence of anti-conservative discrimination.
The critiques also capitalize on the skepticism Americans have long held toward book-learning. He thinks that these attacks on higher education as being left-leaning land because there is some validity to them. But I think the fact of a skew toward the liberal side does provide a believability for the extreme and false statements.
Zimmerman also wonders about the role Trump has played in prompting Republicans to revise down their opinions of colleges.
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