[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
I share your vision of a bright future where our educational landscape is choked with Bob Jonesesque universities, and right-thinking parents will finally have the choice of whether to send their doe-eyed progeny to the America-hating, liberal indoctrination school, or to the fair, balanced campus where the real truth is bequeathed.
[/QUOTE]
Well, to be fair to Starving Artist, i think he’d be happy if the product of American universities were merely good Republicans; they need not necessarily be fundamentalist Christian Republicans.
He has a vision of a society, and a teaching environment, where it is possible to be truly apolitical. You’ll notice that the examples he gives of subjects that colleges should teach include only math, science, and engineering. He hasn’t quite yet been able to formulate a process for teaching subjects like history, sociology, economics, or political science in a way that might be truly apolitical. We can, of course, only speculate on what an apolitical humanities or social science course would look like to SA, but his “arguments” and “reasoning” on this message board suggest that apolitical would, for him, be anything that conforms to his own worldview.
The really funny thing about the sort of rant that SA makes against the evil liberal institutions of our society is that, while he spends so much time worrying about this stuff, if he actually took more than a few seconds to look around at what actually happens in America, he’d see that, even if his arguments about liberal domination of universities were right, this terrible situation hasn’t exactly led to the downfall of modern American civilization, or even downfall of conservatism within it.
Hell, in the period since 1967 (the last four decades), the US President has been a Republican for 27 of those years, while there have been only 13 years with a Democratic President. Republicans have also controlled one or both houses of Congress for considerable periods, including control of both houses from 1994 to 2006. All this in a period when, if you believe SA, millions of liberal-indoctrinated students have been pouring forth, zombie-like, from colleges and universities, ready to put their brainwashing into action and ensure leftist control of the nation. As a lefty/liberal, i could only wish that liberal propaganda had been as pervasive and effective as SA seems to believe.
Note that i’m not disputing SA’s assertion that liberalism tends to flourish on college campuses, although conservative institutions, and conservative voices within non-conservative institutions are conveniently ignored by morons like SA who see only liberal propaganda in higher education. As someone who spends most of his time inside the halls of higher education, i’m happy to admit that the majority of the people i know who teach in my discipline (history) and in related humanities disciplines probably lean to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Hell, my own university’s newspaper did a study recently and found that far more faculty members at my school donate to Democrats than to Republicans.
The problem with arguments about liberal domination on campus isn’t that they’re always wrong; it’s that they miss the point. I’ve made this argument before, and the more i teach the more i believe it: as someone who teaches undergrads, i can assure you that about the biggest concern facing many faculty is not conservatism and how to turn students into good liberals; it’s apathy, and how to turn students into keen scholars. I’m one of this board’s more leftist people, and i can tell you without word of a lie that i’d prefer a class full of keen and engaged conservatives over a class full of apathetic liberals every time. Getting students to read all the texts, and to engage in class discussion, is one of the biggest challenges i face, and if a student is a conservative who disagrees with me, or with other students, so much the better as it makes for a livelier and more engaging class discussion.
Furthermore, the simplistic ranting about “indoctrination” peddled by the drooling idiots of the world demonstrates profound ignorance about what the process of learning is all about, and what it is that students take away from their studies. Implicit in SA’s argument is the notion that students merely act as sponges, absorbing everything we tell them uncritically and without reference to their own family background, social position, prior education, and personal political preferences. I have no doubt that some students do, in fact, have their ideas and their politics changed or influenced by what they hear in college classrooms, but the idea that this occurs in all students, and that it somehow occurs independently of the students’ own cognitive abilities and rational calculations, is ridiculous. We don’t just get to hold students down, inject them with liberalism, and send them out into the world to do our bidding.
The students we get in colleges and universities are adults, here by choice. Why should our own political positions be off limits, or subordinated to the ideas of parents or “common sense” (if that term even has any meaning when it comes to politics). I don’t hold the same politics as my parents, and i know plenty of people in the same boat. I wasn’t aware that young adults were somehow required to think and vote Republican just because mom and dad do.
I know this will probably come as a surprise to people like SA who see a lefty propagandist behind every college lectern, but plenty of college teachers take very seriously their responsibility as educators, and are committed to providing the best possible education for the students whom they teach. I’m not denying that our political views influence how we teach, but the professional duty to educate is uppermost in our minds.
Perhaps the most intellectually bankrupt part of SA’s argument is the idea that political objectivity, some sort of ideal neutrality, is possible. There seems to be a belief that, if certain aspects of demeanor and “balance” are adhered to, students will get an apolitical and objective education. But ideology can quite easily mask itself with the pieties of balance and objectivity, while continuing to push a particular political position. Better, i think, to acknowledge the fact that educators are human beings, and as such are political creatures who cannot avoid incorporating their political beliefs into their teaching in some way or other. If students and society in general are aware of this, then they will both be better equipped to confront and evaluate other people’s politics, and make their own decisions about what they believe to be right.
