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Liberal Bias in Universities

onthebottom

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An interesting article from the Economist:

If you loathe political debate, join the faculty of an American university

TOM WOLFE'S new novel about a young student, “I am Charlotte Simmons�, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland—about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to “Animal House�.
In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students “hook up� (ie, sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap.
Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect (that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He fires off a few predictable arrows at “diversoids�—students who are chosen on the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of the diversity industry.

Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of “diversity officers�. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.

“So what�, you might say, particularly if you happen to be an American liberal academic. Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation� that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?
This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies�. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

Bias in universities is hard to correct because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small republics� described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.

Cont....

OTB
 

onthebottom

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Cont......

Ivy-clad propaganda

The question is what to do about it. The most radical solution comes from David Horowitz, a conservative provocateur: force universities to endorse an Academic Bill of Rights, guaranteeing conservatives a fairer deal. Bills modelled on this idea are working their way through Republican state legislatures, most notably Colorado's. But even some conservatives are nervous about politicians interfering in self-governing institutions.
Mr Balch prefers an appropriately Madisonian solution to his Madisonian problem: a voluntary system of checks and balances to preserve the influence of minorities and promote intellectual competition. This might include a system of proportional voting that would give dissenters on a faculty more power, or the establishment of special programmes to promote views that are under-represented by the faculties.
The likelihood of much changing in universities in the near future is slim. The Republican business elite doesn't give a fig about silly academic fads in the humanities so long as American universities remain on the cutting edge of science and technology. As for the university establishment, leftists are hardly likely to relinquish their grip on one of the few bits of America where they remain in the ascendant. And that is a tragedy not just for America's universities but also for liberal thought.



OTB
 

onthebottom

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happygrump said:
Is this the same magazine that supported Kerry against Bush?
Yes, it is.

OTB
 

papasmerf

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bbking said:
Haven't you gotten it yet OTB - you have to have a heart and brain to be a good Liberal. Isn't that what the GOP tells the unwashed masses of the red states about the Eastern elite and those Hollywood types. :p


bbk

You forgot to add deep pockets to afford it.
 

onthebottom

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bbking said:
Haven't you gotten it yet OTB - you have to have a heart and brain to be a good Liberal. Isn't that what the GOP tells the unwashed masses of the red states about the Eastern elite and those Hollywood types. :p


bbk
I love the "heart" stuff, we'll take your money and buy your vote with it and then you'll thank us. Makes perfect sense, no really it does.

Now adress the article, or is this typical liberal elitist topic shifting.

;-) Ranger68 is my new idol

OTB
 

islandboy

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Well said Onthebottom. Dogma, either liberal or conservative is simply bad. It makes is easier to convince people (including oneself) based upon 30 second sound bites that play into predispostions and ignore analysis. One problem in dealing with the fall out of this issue is that real answers require so much analysis that thinking in short cuts is somewhat inevitable. How does one then restrict sloganeeing and ensure that problems receive fair and open debate.

Perhaps, in politics you could ban all ads under a certain time limit and which did not deal with stated facts. (Imagine the uproar?) Perhaps in education, in each major there should be a required course in contrary thinking. At the University of Chicago for example, it economics faculty would have to teach one course in Harvard style Kennsion econonics - actually it does that right along to be sure its student understand those Harvard people; the harder thing would be to get the Harvard people to finally give a good course in monetarism. But you get the idea. Teaching what the other side has to say is surely a justifiable requirement of a "liberal" education.
 

ocean976124

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Communism is dead, well except China, North Korea, and American Universities...
 

strange1

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onthebottom said:
... A ticket to “Animal House�.
In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students “hook up� (ie, sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap. ..
I've got to go back to University.

On the serious side, Universities suffer from an increasingly bureaucratic system of interfaculty politics. They seem to be more focused on procedural norms instead of developing critical thinking skills. Without a specific policy valuing diverse views, administrators, like most people, will tend to hire those whose views and opinions mesh with their own.

In addition, Universities no longer fulfil the same role that they used to. It is now the accepted middle and upper class expectation that after high school, teens will automatically go to University, irregardless of their future directions, even if the teens know what they are. Modern culture places very little value on trades so youth feel that they're a failure unless they make it to University. Since modern Universities no longer have a majority of their students planning to focus on developing critical thinking skills for the love of learning, how can they be expected to live up to the expectations of the past.

BTW. it's called "Liberal Arts" for a reason.
 

islandboy

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But then again, you Canadians outrigth ban hate speak without a showing in immenant danger (immediant incidentment) of violence as in the States.
 

someone

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The impression I get is that American universities/colleges come in both extremes. I remember applying to some American places when I was on the job market and getting these statements of religious affirmation to fill out. Basically, they wanted to make sure you were the right religion (or at least religious). When I got those I knew to just forget about the application.

To some extent you get that in Canadian universities but it is more specific to certain disciplines. I have yet to meet anyone working in a Canadian sociology department who was not extremely left wing. Political science is almost as bad (although I have meant American political scientists who are actually Republican). Liberal arts types like English professors also tend to me left wing but I don’t mind that so much as in their case they are just personal and not professional opinions (they are not being paid for their understanding of economic and social issues). Likewise, I think it is irrelevant whether natural scientists are left or right wing as it does not relate to their professional expertise On the other had, you often (but not always) find right wing types in Business departments. At times you even get ideological types in economics but it is not nearly as bad as left wing ideological types think (they tend to claim that anything they disagree with is part of a right wing plot even). Personally, I think it is good for students to be exposed to as many ideas as possible. The problem occurs if they only get exposed to one type of thinking. Moreover, I do think that some of the left wing disciplines reward those who think like them with higher grades.
 

papasmerf

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someone said:
The impression I get is that American universities/colleges come in both extremes. I remember applying to some American places when I was on the job market and getting these statements of religious affirmation to fill out. Basically, they wanted to make sure you were the right religion (or at least religious). When I got those I knew to just forget about the application.

.

Would be my bet that Christian Universities can ask that their students be religious.
 

someone

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papasmerf said:
Would be my bet that Christian Universities can ask that their students be religious.
Fortunately that type of instiution is far less common in Canada.
 

papasmerf

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someone said:
Fortunately that type of instiution is far less common in Canada.

Can't see how that is fortunate. After all isn't is about choice?
 

someone

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papasmerf said:
Can't see how that is fortunate. After all isn't is about choice?
Universities have two functions. The main one is to expand knowledge through research. The search for truth as nothing to do with religious superstition (or “belief�, if you find “belief� less offensive than “superstition�). The second function is dissemination of knowledge and education. Education should be about knowledge and critical thought and not “beliefs� (to use a polite word). Moreover, it should expose students to different ideas and challenge the to think about things in new ways. That will not happend if they are being taught by people who already thing the way they do.
 

papasmerf

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someone said:
Universities have two functions. The main one is to expand knowledge through research. The search for truth as nothing to do with religious superstition (or “belief�, if you find “belief� less offensive than “superstition�). The second function is dissemination of knowledge and education. Education should be about knowledge and critical thought and not “beliefs� (to use a polite word). Moreover, it should expose students to different ideas and challenge the to think about things in new ways. That will not happend if they are being taught by people who already thing the way they do.

Guess it is all a matter of perspective and of course up to the individual. Unless of course you favor the elimination of a persons right to choose the education, best suited for oneself.

Of course I expect you support peoples right to go to the university of their choice and even Christian or Catholic ones if they choose.
 

someone

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papasmerf said:
Guess it is all a matter of perspective and of course up to the individual. Unless of course you favor the elimination of a persons right to choose the education, best suited for oneself.

Of course I expect you support peoples right to go to the university of their choice and even Christian or Catholic ones if they choose.
As long as they are not getting my tax dollars, directly or indirectly. However, I still think it is unfortunate.
 

papasmerf

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someone said:
As long as they are not getting my tax dollars, directly or indirectly. However, I still think it is unfortunate.


You do have the right to beleve that. Just as other has to disagree with you.
 

Ranger68

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I'm sorry, was that an op-ed piece, or part of a smear campaign?

LOL

Nice hypocrisy there, neo-cons.
LOL
 

Ranger68

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I really hope the right can keep this arrogance and anger up for another four years ... Then the Republicans will be truly insignificant, like an op-ed page article actually.

LOL
 
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