Florida state legislator trying to tell professors what they can say.

Great Debates
101

What, in your mind, constitutes promoting the liberal agenda? Is it the belief that race/sex/whatever should not be a necessary factor in determining who can be educated at the university? Affirmative Action? Endorsement of left-leaning economic policies? How tangible does this ideological environment have to be to effectively promote liberal beliefs? How can one be influenced by an instructor’s political beliefs when you don’t even know what said instructor’s beliefs are?

I don’t want to turn this thread into an AA debate, so I’m not going to go into much detail on that topic. I’m not implying that right wing faculty would, with certainty, try to implement any discriminatory policies at all. I included this mainly as a way to avoid any arguments that some might want to ban homosexuals from the school, to take a popular example.

There’s always going to be the occasional nut, but that’s not what’s being debated here. Your claim was that 85% of college professors actively promote the liberal agenda in their classrooms. My point is that, in a significant number of courses, this is quite difficult to do without straying dramatically from the subject area. I fail to see how the instructor’s personal beliefs constitute promoting an agenda in these cases.

I was under the impression that many economists and business people tend to take a more laissez faire approach to governing than the general population.
The other point was covered by CrankyAsAnOldMan. What some people think should be taught is much less important than what is taught.

I’m sure these are more open to bias than other courses. However, even if the student does not get an accurate account of the many beliefs that exist in the subject (a failure on the part of the instructor), there is still the library. Being able to explain different schools of thought is much more important in a teacher than their own ideology.

Kimstu explained my reasoning on this rather accurately. I didn’t mean to imply that conservatives are opposed to the study of other cultures, just that liberals might tend to see it as more important. Varying interest between different groups is a much more self-inflicted bias than evidence for any sort of academic conspiracy. That said, there is no more reason to turn conservatives away from cultural studies than there is to turn them away from math.

It’s entirely possible to offer an accurate synopsis of an opinion you disagree with. If someone is incapable of that, a better option might be to assign readings from a variety of sources. This gives each side a chance to express their own views.

102

What is it you want broken down? If 85% of faculty are voting democrat, then I think it’s fair for me to summarize that the faculty “have the same viewpoint”. Maybe that statement is somewhat hyperbolic, but why are you focusing on it? I could say that they “tend to all have a similar viewpoing regarding polics” every time instead of using the word “same” but then my posts would all be 5,000 words long. Try and get at the meat of what I’m saying without just splitting such fine hairs. Please understand that it’s difficult trying to respond to so many at once.

A college proffessor opposed to affirmative action would be irregular IMO. Why? I don’t know. Personal experience. Reading the news. What kind of explination are you looking for here?

So, it’s OK to have a racist policy as long as there’s a financial benefit for the organization? I disagree.

I don’t think affirmative action helps the schools financially or otherwise. Having less qualified students actually lowers the quality of education at the school and, in the long run, hurts the institution in terms of prestige and financially.

Do you have anything to back this up with? I don’t see the liberal studies aspect of higher ed being in any danger. My college is a business specialty school. They just recently added liberal arts majors, never having had them before. Also, while I was there they added a requirement that everyone must have a liberal arts minor in order to graduate. I chose history. :slight_smile:

What? I just gave you some of it on affirmative action. Is that what you had in mind?

103

First off, I compliment you on managing to maintain different arguments with different people–I know that’s not easy.

But now I’m confused. It seems you said to me that graduates’ voting patterns don’t tell us much about how they think. But you told eponymous that *faculty[/] voting patterns do signify how they think. Am I misunderstanding?

Now this is a bit of a side issue, but something Kimstu hinted at has me amused. Let’s say we all agreed that the only possible way to guarantee no bias in teaching is to change the faculty so they were proportional to the general population in terms of political viewpoint (however we measure that).

Now just how are we going to do that? By golly, I think we’d do something that looks a lot like affirmative action. Every time a faculty job came open, you’d favor the conservative candidate over the liberal. O the irony. Can someone think of another way (aybe I’m not thinking outside the box)?.

And I think all the same arguments would apply. When you have more qualified candidates than you have places to offer, then what should the institution do? They’ve got to make decisions somehow. Couldn’t they make them based on criteria that they feel will ultimately improve the education offered? Such as adding to the political diversity of the faculty? I think so. But this is behavior that has many people–many conservatives, to hear you tell it–claiming that it hurts overall quality. Well, how could that be? It suggests the complainer believes that conservatives are inherently poorer quality than liberals.

104

Yes, that would be one example.

Yes. Another good example.

Yes. Another good example.

I don’t know. Depends on the person being promoted to, I guess.

I find this to be an odd question. Let me respond with another question: What makes you think that not knowing what an instructors beliefs are would make a person immune to possibly being influenced by them?

If I didn’t know anything about the personal beliefs of Michael Moore, would that prevent me from being influenced by a viewing of F-9/11?

Fair enough. I appreciate that people haven’t yet jumped on me for my opinion on affirmative action. However, it’s a good example of the subject at hand. If faculty members tend to be liberal, then they don’t consider conservative opinions regarding such things as affirmative action. This one form of the bias that I’m talking about.

I have not stated that. (Well, if I did, then I mis-spoke.)

I’ll restate more carefully my main point: The fact that 85% of faculty members vote democrat results in universities promoting a liberal agenda towards students.

I’m not saying that all professors actively promote anything. I’ve said that some prof’s are better than others and are capable of not showing any bias. But, people are not machines. Most people do allow their own views to show through, especially regarding soft sciences like liberal arts.

…and I’ve acknowledged this. Several times. Why do you continue to point this out when it’s been conceded to by me?

I disagree that all (or even most) teachers are capable of presenting an opinion they disagree with the same accuracy or competancy as someone who does agree with it.

105

fixed coding

Nope. I haven’t said that grad’s voting patterns don’t tell us much about how they think. I would say it does tell us a great deal about how they think. I have said that the voting habits of the grads doesn’t tell us much about how effective the liberal bias of the institutions they attended is at swaying them. This is because there isn’t a baseline to compare them to.

Maybe if colleges weren’t biased to the left than even higher numbers of grads would vote republican? There’s no way to know this. I just was saying earlier that pointing to the fact that most grads do vote republican doesn’t mean that there isn’t a bias problem in the schools.

:smiley: That’s not what I’m saying!

You see, I’m a conservative type. (fiscally, anyway) Just because I can recognize something is a problem doesn’t mean that I am complaining that I want someone to fix it for me, especially not the government. I’m simply willing to acknowledge the reality that educational institutions are biased to the left a great deal, and this is probably having some kind of impact on the students attending them. That’s it.

106

Again: Debaser, do you think you have an accurate statistic without knowing what the pool of qualified candidates for these positions looks like? Seems to me that you’ve got some very shoddy statistics if you’re comparing the opinions of professors to those of the American public in general, instead of comparing them to the opinion of people who could take these jobs.

Daniel

107

Yeah, I was just kind of noodling around with this idea because it struck me as funny. And while I don’t necessarily believe there is a big bias problem within the classroom, I’d probably be in favor of it if a department wanted to do just this sort of “affirmative action” when it came to political leanings. If they had compelling reasons to believe the college would be a better place educationally for it, then I think it’s their perogative to pass over the flaming liberal in favor of the archconservative.

Of course when this gets out I’ll have to turn in my “Liberal Agenda” membership card. Rats; it always got me a discount on fair-trade coffee at the student union.

108

Cranky: *I’d probably be in favor of it if a department wanted to do just this sort of “affirmative action” when it came to political leanings. If they had compelling reasons to believe the college would be a better place educationally for it, then I think it’s their perogative to pass over the flaming liberal in favor of the archconservative.
Of course when this gets out I’ll have to turn in my “Liberal Agenda” membership card. *

Not necessarily: if you read the whole of the comments by Davidson that I linked to earlier, you’ll see that she too points out that the purpose of affirmative action is to increase diversity, and that a college is perfectly free to apply that principle to getting more Republicans.

However, colleges can’t get more Republicans if Republicans aren’t there in the applicant pool to be got. In fact, the more I turn this over in my mind, the more I’m struck by puzzling contradictions in this push for “ideological diversity”:

  • Many conservatives disdain academia in general as an “ivory tower” separate from the “real world” and “common sense” and dependent on the “public teat”, and most conservatives apparently don’t want to work there.

  • But many conservatives complain about conservatives being underrepresented in academia.

  • Many conservatives express even stronger disdain for the “elite”, “internationalized” American universities such as Harvard, which studies show have a high percentage of liberals in their faculties and administrations.

  • But the conservatives who control much of the American business world (outnumbering liberals by about ten to one, according to the cite I linked earlier) still prize degrees from such “elite” universities as a good qualification in job applicants.

Apparently there’s a certain amount of ambiguity there. There’s also the issue of the strong streak among many American conservatives (IME, not so noticeable in other countries) of conscious anti-intellectualism. This certainly isn’t intrinsic to conservative principles in any way, and many of the people who value scholarship and research most highly are themselves conservative. However, our culture also fosters the variety of conservative who considers erudition or intellectualism of any kind suspicious, untrustworthy, or foolish and impractical. There are some liberals who also think this way—AFAICT, mostly among the remnant of radical blue-collar left-wingers and a few “union Democrats”—but the majority of anti-intellectuals seem to be conservatives (often strongly religious and/or social conservatives).

So I think if conservatives are really worried about colleges and universities being dominated by liberals, they will first have to straighten out their own love/hate relationship with academia. Do they want to play a more significant role in elite academic institutions? If so, why? What do they feel they need to accomplish there? What is keeping them from those accomplishments? Do they consider themselves unfairly discriminated against, or simply underrepresented? What are their reasons for thinking so? What will it take for them to achieve the goals they’re aiming at? What sacrifices are they willing to make, in earning power and/or prestige, in order to pursue careers in a field that many of them look down on and find parasitic or irrelevant? Will they need to change the image of academia within their own ranks? If so, how will they go about it?

Get those issues straightened out, and you’ve got yerself a movement. Leave them in their current confused and contradictory state, and you’ll probably never get anything more than unfocused griping.

Sample_the_Dog: *The campus revolutions of the '60s and '70s produced a crop of predominantly liberal academics who are now running the show. *

I’ve heard this comment often, and it’s always kind of puzzled me, because I can’t make the math work out properly (and I was a math major, so I know it’s not just me ;)). To wit: if the impetus that produced all these liberal academics was the campus radicalism of the '60s and '70s, then counting the additional several years required for those campus radicals to get their doctorates and land their jobs, they can’t have started “running the show” much before the late 1970’s.

But I started college in 1981, and I remember that many conservatives were complaining even back then that they were underrepresented. Now, are the dates off somewhere? Or did the conservative academics just capitulate really, really fast (in less than five years) to the radical “new wave”? Or have conservatives actually been underrepresented in academia for a significantly longer time, due to their self-selecting away from academia for the various reasons mentioned above?

109

I do love spoonerisms, Kimstu, but this one was unintentional. Just typing too fast.

To answer your questions, ElvisL1ves:

How much longer would you recommend my “staying in school”? I found 2 masters and a doctorate quite sufficient, thank you very much.

My experience at university hardly confirmed my pre-existing notions about the world. As a kid from a dying Southern mill-town who went off to a small elite private university on scholarship, I immediately found myself totally out of my ken, and had to do a lot of learning, both socially and academically, to make it. This place was a notorious C school – students had to earn Bs and As, even back during the VietNam war days as I understand – and my scholarship required maintaining a 3.5 on a 4.0 scale. They busted my nuts. I am forever in their debt for that.

Perhaps that explains my disgust at a system in which I had to explain outcomes-based grading to students who were being churned out of a social-placement-based educational system.

My post related my experiences while teaching at university, not attending it. So I know whereof I speak. One of my complaints was precisely that the curriculum was not exposing students to enough new views and materials that were truly relevant to the field. For example, I never allowed students to choose their own reading materials or bring in pop song lyrics for poetry discussions, as some others did. Selecting the most appropriate materials was my job, and part of what the students were paying me to do.

The standard texts could be extremely soft-pitch, too. I remember one chosen by the dept that included translations of Asian graffiti from the walls of a West Coast immigrant detention center – for a Literature in English course! Meanwhile, many students were led to believe that “white Western culture” was monolithic, which it certainly wasn’t. And the discussion questions – don’t get me started… very subjective and soft.

I left when it became clear that I couldn’t defend the academy from many of the accusations being hurled at it. In my experience, many of the stereotypes were true. Profs were using the English Dept classroom as a venue for practicing sociology without a license. Sophomores were writing papers on gender roles in Shakespeare, without having been taught anything about Elizabethan society and arts, or even what the vocabulary meant. I was written off by many as a fossilized “historicist” for insisting that we must begin by establishing the context, rather than allowing our students the easy out of simply spouting off their surface reactions to whatever was on the page – a practice often defended as “establishing the relevance of literature to the reader’s experience” and other such sophistry.

They broke me. I got tired of banging my head against the wall and getting nowhere, so I changed careers. But hey, at least I stayed in the trenches for a few years.

I have no regrets about leaving academia. Perhaps when I retire I’ll go back to teaching. Maybe by then I’ll have learned something.

Oh, and Debaser, by the time I got to those paragraphs I was in rant mode and was using “you” more in the sense of “one” than as a direct reference to your post. Thanks for being so gentle in your reply.

110

I’d say the latter. In my field, I believe the tide started turning well before the '60s. But keep in mind also that the university is, in many ways, highly decentralized, as a guard of academic freedom. So as the “old guard” moved up into administration or moved on into other careers, younger profs were able to establish their voice rather quickly.

Also, the English department is something of a strange beast. Because English tends to be universally required, and students often must take English Dept courses into their sophomore and junior years, the faculty and staff is often quite large. Many older tenured profs avoid teaching undergrads if they can help it – and these days many institutions have removed the requirements that full profs teach a minimum number of undergrad classes. So the undergrads, by and large, see more of the younger, more liberal TAs, instructors, and non-tenured faculty.

111

Is that really a liberal-conservative split, Sample? It sounds to me more like a split between people who can think and fuzzy-headed post-modernist idiots to me. In my grad studies days the philosophy departments were skewed fairly liberal politically, too, but just try to get the kind of bs you’re talking about past a bunch of analytic philosophers! (I can’t be answerable for the Continental types who read Habermas and the like :D)

112

That post was something of a hijack, responding to E’s question. But as it turns out, yes, the more liberal faculty tended to be more in favor of “progressive” approaches to pedagogy and curriculum which focused more on reader response than on historical approaches to lit.

113

Sample: * In my field, I believe the tide started turning well before the '60s. *

Coincidentally, I was just reminded of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, complaining how liberalism under the guise of “academic freedoms” was destroying what ought to be that university’s mission of promoting the Christian faith and free-market principles. That book was published back in 1951.

114

I don’t think it is a hijack, because I think it’s getting at exactly what sort of actual impact a political bias among faculty might have on pedagogy. You’ll have to excuse me, because I’m not at all sold on your “liberals tended to be more in favour of progressive approaches” line. Allow me a couple questions.

Was the split on these issues really along political lines? Or might it have been tied more to something like age? Were there even enough (political) conservatives in the department to make a statistically relevant statement?

I’m going to offer an alternative hypothesis. I don’t think that the political views of these people are drivers of their theoretical views in any significant way. I think that it’s precisely the other way around. There’s this significant proportion of liberal arts, and to a lesser extent of the social sciences, that’s heavily influenced by post-modernism and neo-Marxist thought. People who think that truth is subjective, and have bought in rather too heavily to stuff like Kuhn. These people are also liberals (or more properly leftists), and it’s no surprise given that the history of this school of thought goes back to Hegel by way of Marx. But these people don’t hold their fuzzy-headed post-modernist views because they’re leftists; rather, they’re leftists because they hold fuzzy-headed post-modernist views.

Once we’re outside the realm of post-modernism, I have serious doubts that the politics of academia are going to skew radically with respect to fiscal liberalism/conservatism. However, here we run into a second issue: social conservatism gets almost no play in academia. I suspect this is because the primary driver of social conservatism is a particular variety of religiosity which is somewhat averse to higher learning. In any event, there’s very little social conservatism to be found, and so the conservatives you do find in academia tend to be of a more libertarian variety, and perhaps more likely to vote based on their socially liberal views than on their fiscally conservative ones.

So what pedagogical issue arise out of this? Postmodernists advocate bad leftist analysis of their subjects, and social conservatism gets short shrift. The former is an academic issue, not a political one. The answer is critical thinking, not some sort of political affirmative action. The second issue isn’t a problem. :slight_smile:

115

Michael Moore’s political beliefs are transparently obvious from a viewing of f 9/11 with no other knowledge about the man. It’s a political film. I wouldn’t begin to have a clue what the political leanings of my calculus and physics profs were.

116

I would have to say that this, in public universities, is unequivocally a good thing. If that makes me biased to the left, then so be it.

I meant the question to be along the lines of: if someone never mentions issue X, how can their beliefs on that issue influence you. This is related to more of the post a few lines down, so no response is necessary.

Dismissal of an argument before you’ve even heard it is not a liberal trait, members of any imaginable side do this. I’ll admit that something like this may be helped by promoting more political diversity.

Then I must be misinterpreting something. I meant
“My point is that, in a significant number of courses, this is quite difficult to do without straying dramatically from the subject area. I fail to see how the instructor’s personal beliefs constitute promoting an agenda in these cases.”
and
“The notion that a teacher advances his own political ideology simply by virtue of his being present in class, even a class that is completely detached from politics (calculus, in this case), is absurd.”
to mean the same thing, though you agreed with the former and not the latter. Is there an implication in one of those sentences that I neglected when writing my posts?

The degree of competency required really depends on what course is being taught. Optimal use of professors seems to be the issue here. Sure, if some academic view is underrepresented, then it’s probably in the best interests of both the students and university to employ a representative. But then, except in fields where political and academic opinion are strongly related, I don’t see why having one set of beliefs being outnumbering the other is a problem.

117

Do you mean Thomas Kuhn? I hadn’t thought he was advocating that truth was subjective, rather he was noting that in some fields it was common for academics to feel that way. Have I oversimplified things? I thought he was simply explaining why some fields “behave” the way they do, not advancing an argument in their favor.

Maybe I need a primer; I confess I’m a lot more familiar with Kuhn as a jumping-off point for other inquiry into academic disciplines.

118

I think that’s a valid way of looking at it. There were very few young conservatives besides myself, but a good proportion of the male senior faculty were Christian and traditional. Several of them were signatories to the annual public declaration of faith published by the Christian faculty in the campus paper every year.

That said, I must repeat that there was a high degree of professionalism in the classroom. I am reminded, for example, of one Southern gentleman (now deceased) who taught our Literature in the Bible section for many years. He was a self-professed Bible-believing Christian, but he tolerated no evangelism or witnessing in his course from any quarter.

Many of the long-tenured women were proto-feminists who had come up through a blatantly biased system, and were somewhat radicalized by the experience – or, taking your approach, perhaps only the gutsy radicals had the tenacity to make it. This group, imho, had the most vigorous work ethic in the dept, btw.

Of course, you’ve got your moth-eaten Marxists still lingering here and there who were openly antagonistic to religion and conservative politics, even at times in the classroom. But mostly it was the young idealists who went straight from college into grad school and then instructorship who felt comfortable dismissing and even deriding anything that smacked of old-school, traditional, right-wing, or religious thought.

119

Well…it’s complicated.

Kuhn’s major work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argues, more or less, that scientific “progress” can’t be understood as getting at truth. Whether or not Kuhn thought that truth itself was subjective…ehhhh, hard to say. But certainly many people who’ve followed in his academic footsteps have thought that truth is subjective, which is more what I meant.

120

Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of. I think I just came at it from a different perspective.