You know, it’s probably worth pointing out that what constitutes bias here depends on one’s frame of reference. I’ve little doubt that American academia is significantly to the left of mainstream America. I suspect, however, that it doesn’t skew left much, if at all, from the views of modern industrialized democracies taken as a whole. So what really constitutes “liberal” and “conservative”? You’re obviously conflating the two with party affiliation, but that strikes me, a non-American, as just silly. (Though, to be fair, the whole voter registration including the party affiliation thing strikes me as silly too.) The Democrats are liberal on some issues, and conservative on others. The Republicans are liberal on some issues, and conservative on others. Yet Americans are seemingly so slavishly devoted to party-based partisanship that a liberal view on gun control is labeled as conservative, and conservative views on foreign policy are labeled as liberal. The mind boggles.
Debaser: I just think it’s decidedly odd that anyone would try and argue that there isn’t a huge, obvious and consistent bias at America’s colleges and universities.
Or at least, at the top colleges and universities. All of these surveys I’ve seen seem to focus exclusively on the most academically competitive and/or prestigious colleges, sometimes (as in your first link) just the so-called “Ivy League”. Even the “32 of the nation’s top colleges and universities” considered in your second link represent less than 1% of the total colleges and universities in the US, and probably only about 1% of the total college student population. I’d be interested to see what the political-bias trend looks like in the more “rank and file” institutions.
I also think that the level of alarm about the “liberal bias of academia” seems a little exaggerated compared to attitudes about similar levels of “conservative bias” in other areas:
If top-college faculty and administrators (as per Debaser’s quote) have a 10-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans, why should that be more upsetting than the fact that CEO’s have a 10-to-1 ratio of Republicans to Democrats? I don’t see anybody demanding that companies should introduce more “ideological diversity” in their top management, or that the military should promote more Democrats into its leadership.
If people are really being oppressed for their minority opinions, that’s something we should take very seriously, especially in a setting devoted to the free exchange of ideas, as academia is supposed to be. But I don’t think we’ve automatically got cause for concern just because one ideological position happens to be much more popular than another one. Or if so, I want to see the same people who complain about liberal bias in academia also complaining about conservative bias in the military or in corporate management.
Debaser: *This doesn’t prevent me from acknowledging the simple reality that if you walk into a church or a military barracks in this country then you are going to get a conservative crowd. *
Er, that really depends on what kind of church it is, doesn’t it? My mom’s Quaker meeting, for example, would be awfully surprised to hear that they were a “conservative crowd”. 
Debaser: [i[The complaints from the left about Fox News are louder than any complaints from the right when the shoe was on the other foot.*
Hmm, do you happen to have a “measuring tool” to determine the loudness of complaints? Because I sure still hear lots of very loud complaining about the “liberal media”.
I left academia because knee-jerk liberalism was so pervasive in my field that I just couldn’t stand it anymore. (I favored abolishing the NEA, for example, so you can imagine where that left me.) But that was from the perspective of someone behind the big desk. In the classroom, I saw a few teachers pushing their agendas – TAs were more prone to this than instructors or profs – but that was the exception.
Sadly, it was more frequent (though still uncommon) to see students burdened with a kind of hair-trigger paranoia that their views wouldn’t be heard. Naturally, the conservatives and more fundamentalist-leaning Christians were more likely to speak up, b/c the liberal students were fewer in number and ran into fewer perceived problems.
For some students, it was very hard to get them to understand the difference between critiquing their logic, evidence, and word choice on the one hand, and criticizing their worldview on the other. I had a couple who never did get it, who were certain I was grading them down because of their political or religious orientation. Meanwhile, their prose needed serious work. I think they assumed I was a liberal, btw, as I was careful not to interject my own personal beliefs into the course.
As for the testimony under oath… 3 complaints in 30 days? <Yawn>
This kind of legislation is insidious. I do see it as a wedge into speech control. The issue of who gets to determine what’s a valid viewpoint which must be offered, as mentioned above, is important. And given the current level of demagoguery among the political leadership these days, I am afraid.
You are making and unwarranted assumption. And even if I were to examine whether or not colleges were overwhelmingly conservative/liberal, I most definitely wouldn’t limit myself to whether faculty are registered Republican or Democrats (or whether they voted overwhelmingly Democrat or Republican in elections). Eveidence of party affiliation (with respect to registering/voting Democrat or Republican) is not satisfactory evidence of some sort of “liberal/conservative bias”. It’s evidence of some sort of bias (a political or even economic bias), but to equate this with bias in one’s opinions/viewpoints, and this is some sort of evidence of an “agenda” is ludicrous.
I can tell you (anecdotally) why many in academia vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. Because its in their economic interests to do so. It’s been Democrats that have supported teachers/educators rather than Republicans; its been Democrats that have supported more funding for education rather than Republicans. Its’ not because of ideology, per se, that those in academia have supported Democrats. Its’ been for largely economic (and hence political) reasons. If Republicans would vigourously support education as much as the Democrats, then I bet you would definitely see a shift in registration/voting pattersn across acedemia (much as Democrats supporting business as vigorously as Republicans would change registration/voting patterns).
Again, it depends on how one defines liberal or conservative. You seem to be throwing around the terms like you know what they actually mean (you probably do, but that doesnt mean that the terms are easy to define and that they can be applied to all people in all instances and on every issue). I suppose if you met me personally, you would consider me to be a liberal. But just because I happen to be liberal in some of my viewpoints/opinions, I’m conservative in other viewpoints. What gives you the right to decide whether I’m a “liberal?” What if I self identify as conservative? By what criteria do you use to make the determination that I’m a liberal? Because you say so?
In other words, you make a claim, but can’t back it up with any conviction that might convince others of the validity of your claim. You provide evidence of some sort of bias, but this evidence cannot be conclusively deemed to be sufficient to support evidence of a “liberal bias/agenda.” Then turn around and accuse others of lying to themselves that they are blind to the overwhelming evidence of “liberal bias.” I’m sure UFOlogists, alien abductees, moon-landing hoaxers, etc. share with you similar sentiments.
It sounds similar to Political Correctness.
Lord knows we more Political Correctness in th eeducational system.
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but I asked for proof that all these liberal professors are “actively working to promote a liberal agenda in the classroom”, which is what you implied in your second post. So far we’ve seen proof that liberals outnumber conservatives on academic faculties and heard a variety of scary-sounding but mostly vague stories about liberal professors hyping their beliefs in the classroom. By the standards we’ve seen conservatives using here, we certainly have more than enough evidence to merit crackdowns and conservative bible colleges and probably the military academies as well.
Let me repeat what I said in the thread when the same legislation was pushed in Ohio. You cannot separate political beliefs from academic subjects all the time. They come up as a natural part of the education process. Education is preparation for the real world, so saying that those aspects of real-world life with connections to politics (which is almost all of real-world life now that conservatives have decided to reignite the culture wars) must be ripped out of education is not just absurd, but impossible. You can’t have political science, or economics, or religious studies, or sociology, or very much of art and literature without politically charged topics coming up.
So what does this mean for the academic world. Look. I had professors at college say things I disagreed with, even disagreed with strong, even which offended me strongly. But I never went whining to my state legislature, demanding that jack-booted thugs be put in place to censor everything that every prof said, nor even that the profs needed to self-censor to protect my dainty little brain. Freedom does not mean that you get to avoid hearing anything that you don’t want to hear. It means that you get to say what you want, and organize the way you want, to protest if you hear something you don’t like, but you don’t get to shut down someone just cause you don’t like hearing them. Now if every professor at a particular institution was repeatedly rubbing the same highly charged political commentary in their students’ faces, we’d have a problem. But if some professors are offending their students with political commentary, it doesn’t mean they’re being intimidated. It means they’re being educated.
Berkeley, Reed, and Pomona have Republican organizations. Students at many right-wing Bible colleges are banned from forming Democrat organizations. But no legislation that I know of has been proposed to fix that “problem”.
StD: *Sadly, it was more frequent (though still uncommon) to see students burdened with a kind of hair-trigger paranoia that their views wouldn’t be heard. *
This is a pity, because this is exactly the same sort of “culture of victimhood” mindset that conservatives have long criticized in the case of women or minorities jumping to conclusions about being belittled through sexism or racism. I guess it’s always natural to dismiss the other guy’s complaint as oversensitive whining, and to take your own complaint seriously as the product of genuine injustice.
Out of curiosity, if someone proposed that the churches and the military be subject to the same sort of equal time requirements as are being mentioned in this thread for academia, would you be for that? The military, after all, is public, and churches get tax breaks. If a conservative pastor were to say, “Abortion is bad and should be outlawed!” should he have to follow it up with, “Of course abortion isn’t always bad and should be between a woman and her doctor”?
jsgoddess: Out of curiosity, if someone proposed that the churches and the military be subject to the same sort of equal time requirements as are being mentioned in this thread for academia, would you be for that?
I don’t think Debaser is arguing in favor of the “equal time” legislation mentioned in the OP; he did say that he isn’t “saying the proposed bill has any merit”.
Rather, I think this disagreement springs from the ambiguity of the term “bias”. Debaser has pointed out evidence that the personal political views of academics (at least at certain colleges) tend to be liberal.
This doesn’t imply, of course, that those academics are “actively working to promote a liberal agenda in the classroom”, as Debaser claimed earlier. If we assume that it does, we also have to assume that all those Republicans who make up 90+% of corporate CEO’s are “actively working to promote a conservative agenda in the workplace.”
In other words, a group of people can exhibit a certain statistical “bias” in their personal opinions, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re trying to promote an ideologically “biased” viewpoint.
A lot of people tend to conflate those two concepts of “bias”; this came up a lot in debates about “liberal media”, where someone would point to surveys showing that reporters tended to vote Democrat more often than Republican, without relating that in any convincing way to observable “slant” in the actual news stories.
Perhaps more directly to the point, it does not establish that there is a definable problem whereby the public good would be well served by the coercion of the state. (Yes, I know Bricker et al. are offering the “the government won’t have to do anything if they do it themselves” line - a threat is a threat.)
Hey, I’m not moron; I know college professors, especially in the humanities, are disproportionately liberal. So what? As has been pointed out, military officers are disproportionately conservative. I would imagine you could find biases on either side in either spectrum; the conservatives must be out there somewhere or else the Republicans wouldn’t be getting any votes. I bet you could find that many specific schools and faculties have conservative biases. Shit, I live in Canada and I had some conservative profs. My economics courses totally converted me into an economic conservative (and I had one dyed-in-the wool socialist for Econ 241 who was one of the least biased profs I ever had. There’s my contribution to the meaningless anecdotal evidence pool.)
What hasn’t been established is that there is a problem that needs legislation. We’ve been presented with some anecdotes that establish to my satisfaction that three or four college profs could use a good cock-punching. I’ve yet to see a real systemic PROBLEM either defined or supported.
You’re right. I didn’t see that whole post. Stupid eyes!
I can definitely see how there could be a liberal bias at any university simply based on what majors/courses are offered. Let’s say that a school offers a “Women’s Studies” major. Well, it could be argued that the very existence of said major is biased in favor of said major having merit. By that token, I can think of a couple of fields of study that some conservatives would label as “liberal” by definition, and I can think of no extant fields that some liberals would label as “conservative” by definition.
Just to muddy the waters a bit more. 
jsgoddess: *A college doesn’t want to accept a student who advocates teaching methods the college does not support–corporal punishment. *
This is relevant to another potentially important issue concerning the “underrepresentation” of conservatives in academia. Namely, many colleges’ official antidiscrimination policies explicitly endorse socially liberal principles of equal rights and affirmative action. Here’s a fairly typical example:
Similar university policies frequently apply not just to employment discrimination but to any form of academic/educational discrimination. Now, if this is the official policy of a private educational institution, how could, say, a conservative Christian who believes that Christianity ought to have an officially privileged status, or a social conservative who believes that homosexuality and transgenderedness are unnatural and sinful, conscientiously associate himself or herself with such an institution?
Complaining that conservative views aren’t adequately represented at such institutions sounds a bit like complaining that there aren’t enough communists running large corporations. We’re talking about institutions that are explicitly, formally committed to embracing certain types of social equality and inclusiveness that are simply anathema to many American conservatives.
This isn’t professors sneakily using their lecterns to enforce a liberal agenda on their unsuspecting indoctrinees: this is a liberal agenda openly, formally, deliberately built into the very structure of the university, on grounds of moral principle. How can anyone expect that conservatives who disagree with those principles should be integrated, or would be willing to be integrated, into the university that espouses them?
It would be like expecting that for-profit corporations—institutions intrinsically dedicated to capitalist principles of competition and profit-making—should integrate into their management a representative number of socialists and communists who don’t believe in those principles. It’s just contrary to the whole basic mission of the institution.
*I’m going to respond directly to Kimstu, since her post encapsulates much of what everybody else is saying. *
Thank you for pointing this out. You are correct. I’m not arguing in favor of the legislation from the OP. I do think that the lack of conservative viewpoints in the classroom is a problem, though.
I can bitch about this being a problem without wanting the government to create some law or program that hopes to fix it. (I really am a conservative, eh?)
Baby steps. Some people in this thread have challenged even the fact that the personal political views of academics are liberal. Or, at least that was the impression that I was getting.
I’m surprised to see that people now seem to be admitting that almost all academics are liberal, and conservatives indeed are underrepresented. I figured everyone would challenge my cite and deny even this basic fact.
I guess we can go forward with the assumption that this is indeed the case.
I do think that conservatives not being represented adequately on campus means that a liberal agenda is being promoted in the classroom. Your analogy with CEO’s falls flat because CEO’s aren’t teachers. They aren’t molding the minds of hundreds of young people every year.
I don’t think that teachers are engaging in some kind of grand conspiracy, sitting in smoke filled rooms hatching up plots on how best to brainwash the children into mindless liberal drones. I do think, though, that by only having professors who are liberal on the staff results in a natural shift to the left in the teaching and thinking that goes on at the school. It’s human nature for the ideology of the teachers to get through in the teaching they do. Students should be exposed to all viewpoints, not just one side. The only effective way to do this is for both sides to be part of the teaching process.
Be honest with yourselves: Would you trade places? If 90% of the teachers being liberal doesn’t result in a bias than would you be OK with 90% of them being conservative? Can anybody honestly say that this wouldn’t result in a dramatically different curriculum being taught at schools?
I’m sorry, Kimstu, but that’s a very flawed argument. You’re reading conservatives out of academia on the basis of a rethinking of the academic mission drawn up by a bunch of liberals.
The purpose of the academy isn’t equal opportunity, affirmative action, or gay-friendly policies. The purpose is intellectual inquiry and education, and conservative viewpoints are hardly averse to such.
Interesting point. But, what you are describing is a chicken or the egg type situation.
You are claiming that conservatives aren’t attracted to the schools because they are dedicated to many liberal ideals. Well, my response would be that the schools are only dedicated to such ideals because they are run by liberals.
You are also giving a good example of exactly the type of bias I am talking about. If 90% of faculty members were social conservatives then the school mission statement might specifically not allow gays or transgendered people admittance because the behavior is “sinful” or such. Certainly, then you would be able and willing to see the bias present.
(I’m not a social conservative, and am actually an atheist, so for the love of Og lets not all start bashing my head in on the merits of such a proposal, OK? I’m just using it to illustrate a point.)
Debaser: I’m surprised to see that people now seem to be admitting that almost all academics are liberal, and conservatives indeed are underrepresented.
Whoops, don’t be too quick to take a mile there. It’s still not at all clear from statistical evidence what the liberal/conservative distribution looks like outside the few dozen “top colleges and universities” that always seem to be examined when this issue comes up. It’s also debatable how the bias is distributed over different academic sectors: for example, I’ve seen studies that suggest that business, engineering, and economics faculties are much less liberal than humanities ones. But I think it seems fairly clear to everybody that there is at least some liberal bias in at least some areas of academia, and that the bias seems quite strong among “top colleges and universities”.
Debaser: *Your analogy with CEO’s falls flat because CEO’s aren’t teachers. They aren’t molding the minds of hundreds of young people every year. *
Say what? Corporate advertising, marketing, and political and social PR are everywhere, including (perhaps especially) in the minds of hundreds of young people. If you’re arguing that teachers are somehow spreading a liberal agenda just by the fact of their being liberal, it’s equally valid to argue that CEO’s are spreading a conservative agenda just by the fact of their being conservative.
You may claim that most CEO’s can and do run their businesses of flogging soft drinks, toilet paper, popcorn, etc., without pushing any overtly conservative viewpoint along with the product (with some notable exceptions like the late Joe Coors, for example). Right, and I’m responding that similarly, most professors can and do perform their jobs of running physics labs, teaching French, grading essays, etc., without pushing any overtly liberal viewpoint along with their instruction.
Mr. Moto: You’re reading conservatives out of academia on the basis of a rethinking of the academic mission drawn up by a bunch of liberals.
The purpose of the academy isn’t equal opportunity, affirmative action, or gay-friendly policies. The purpose is intellectual inquiry and education, and conservative viewpoints are hardly averse to such.
Whoa-hoa there. It’s one thing to worry about liberal professors somehow subverting the goals of their school by unfairly indoctrinating students with their own political biases and evaluating students’ work on the basis of irrelevant ideological criteria. It’s not a very reasonable worry, IMHO, but at least it’s a legitimate issue. And if somebody turns up convincing evidence that this is really going on in a significant way, I’ll agree that it ought to be stopped.
But now you seem to be arguing that the Corporations and Trustees of private colleges and universities—who are the ones who officially set the administrative policies and mission statements, remember—don’t have the right to explicitly endorse principles that you consider too “liberal” and which might alienate potential conservative faculty members. I got a big problem with that.
Debaser: If 90% of faculty members were social conservatives then the school mission statement might specifically not allow gays or transgendered people admittance because the behavior is “sinful” or such.
Right, which BTW is exactly the case in many conservative Christian colleges (usually specified in terms of “adherence to Christian principles and behavior” and so forth). But nobody’s telling those colleges that they need to tear up their mission statements and include more social liberals on their faculties.
Here’s a point I don’t think anyone has yet addressed in this thread: The Colorado bill applies to all colleges and universities in the state, public or private. The Florida bill applies to state universities only. Which is worse (or better, depending on your POV)? Legislation tinkering with academic freedom across the board – or legislation which establishes different standards of academic freedom for public and private institutions?
My mistake – the Florida bill applies to state universities and to public community colleges (which we have in practically every county). But in principle, the question remains the same.
Well, I would say it, though I wouldn’t try to get the force of government behind it. They should do it because it’s the right thing to do. But the extent of my power is, and should be, disapproval and, I suppose, refusal to give 'em money.
This is just silly. You might have a point if you argued that conservative CEO’s are spreading a conservative agenda to their own workers, or within the companies that they run. But, to claim that CEO’s in America have as much influence on young people as teachers in a classroom do is simply absurd. CEO’s don’t interact with students at all. Teachers interact with them every day. The measure of influence isn’t at all comparable.
I must have imagined all those pit threads where people mock the Christians with their teaching non-evolution theories. :rolleyes:
Wouldn’t you agree that a student at such a conservative Christian college would get a conservatively biased education?