This question was recently posed in a class I was in. Most of the other people thought that the liberal arts, especially English Lit., professors were more open minded people. I was that only one who thought that academics in the business department were more open minded. My thinking was that while liberal arts departments entertain and tout less “mainstream” points of view, they seemed to me less tolerant of diverging views. I found business professors to be more pragmatic and more accepting of a wider range of views even though they themselves may have more conservative opinions; i.e. I found them to be open minded due to the wider scope of acceptance of divergent views. My thought was based on many years of exposure to both worlds, but everyone kind of looked at me like I had a third eyeball, so then I shut up.
Depends on how you define “open minded.”
Very true, I haven’t thought much about it before but perhaps my ideas about what makes one an open minded person are different than what is most commonly referred to as open minded.
I majored in business, but later took classes to become a teacher. Many of my business professors were on the conservative side, but were very accepting of people with more liberal views.
My education and liberal arts professors were rather liberal, and most could not accept hearing any conservative views at all, even allowing the other students to mock the conservative ones.
So I would have to agree with you, although I have only my experience as a reference point.
Why are you talking politics with your professors anyway? I don’t know if any of my professors had been either liberal or conservative - somehow it never came up.
I’ve taken many courses. Let’s see…not including training courses, college courses, probably 10 years of undergrad courses, and 4 of graduate. English lit teachers were not, by far, the most open minded. They tended to have a very singular view of what was meant, and about what people should think about this or that piece of text. The jerkiest were math teachers, and engineering. I imagine that comes with lecture after lecture to people that don’t understand basic things while you are trying to write something very complicated for publication. The best, in terms of trying to listen to students and actually teach were probably history teachers. They could have a conversation in normal language without being condescending. Philosophy was also pretty good, but as many of them were logic-oriented, they ended up being a math-lite version of the math teachers. The non-analytic philosophers were interesting and being open-minded was sort of a requirement to have any discussion. Computer-science teachers were ok, but very focused, which probably has to do more with time-constraints than anything else. General science courses, like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. were good and the professors didn’t really have much time to be jerks. There is not much to be open-minded with science unless you are doing research, anyway, from what I can tell.
We were not talking politics per se. The professor who posed the question was interested in the cultural differences in the departments, and wanted to know what some of the students, who as a group had more recent exposure to that department thought of the general culture. She was asking specifically because she and another professor were planning to form a committee that would involve integration of the two departments in some way and she would have much more interaction with the liberal arts professors than she had ever had. I don’t really know any more specific details than this in regards to what sort of integration is being planned.
Many of my professors in the past have expressed personal political/cultural views in class in the classroom. I have lived with a few professors in the past and also have family members who are professors, my own views stem from this.
The only professor I ever had who espoused a specific political view was a math prof. Complex Variables.
Day after election day, 1980, he blows in to the room, smoking a cigar, saying, “Well, it isn’t every day we get rid of Birch Bayh, Frank Church, and George McGovern.”
I got up and walked out.
Other than that, I’ve never had an overtly politicized prof. Lucky me?
Yeah, I would not consider how you described the business people to be “open minded.” Open minded specifically means being open to new ideas. What you are talking about I would call “tolerance.” You can be tolerant while being rather closed minded. It means you know you are right and will not change your mind, but still don’t care if others believe differently.