Question for college professors: What should a conservative do?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Speaking as an actual college professor (albeit one in a hard-science field where political issues literally never come up in connection with the vast majority of the course material, and who also maintains a personal rule against using office space or regular institutional duties as a free bulletin board for advertising general political opinions), I’d offer the following advice:

1) As other posters have noted, figure out what you really mean by “targeting”. A professor merely disagreeing with or criticizing your opinions is not the same thing as a professor actually being unfair to you because of your opinions unrelated to your abilities or performance in the course.

2) Study your college’s student code of conduct, mission statement, harassment/discrimination policies, and other information that spells out what behavior the institution officially considers ethically unacceptable. A surprisingly large number of conservative students come in with a chip on their shoulder about their rights to “freedom of speech” and “academic freedom” and what not, while apparently never noticing that they have contractually agreed to abide by the institution’s rules limiting their freedom to express certain kinds of opinions.

If your college has a policy statement along the lines of “committed to creating a welcoming environment for the campus community without bias on grounds of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin (including ancestry), citizenship status, physical or mental disability (including AIDS), age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law”, etc. etc., and you open your yap in class to say it’s unnatural and unwholesome for gay people to want to get married or for people to identify as transgender, you may be violating those anti-bias principles. A professor who shuts down your anti-gay or anti-trans or similar remarks, or points out that they’re bigoted against gay or trans people, is not “targeting” you: they’re doing their job in supporting the official policy of the institution.

If you feel that that’s an intolerable limitation of your freedom of expression, then as other posters have said, you need to seek out a different institution with different official policies. Don’t expect the college, whose rules you agreed to abide by when you accepted their offer of admission, to start bending or ignoring those rules just so you can express what you consider to be your fundamental conservative beliefs.

3) If, on careful consideration of points (1) and (2), you still feel that your professor is really out of line in gratuitously picking on your legitimate conservative opinions, then take detailed notes of at least two or three incidents that clearly illustrate that (which is good for your note-taking skills too), and approach the professor about it in a courteous and open way. Explain that you feel unfairly singled out for reasons that aren’t related to the course material or your performance in the course, and listen to what they have to say about their interactions with you.

4) If the professor really won’t listen to reason in response to your good-faith attempt to discuss the situation, make detailed notes of that exchange as well, and talk to the department chair and/or a dean about your concerns.

5) In the case of interactions with other students, review points (1) and (2). If you still feel you’re genuinely on the receiving end of unjust and unwarranted illtreatment, make some more detailed notes about the incidents that concern you (your note-taking skills are going to get so good! :)), and talk to your Residential Advisor and/or a dean about them.

22

Yes, this is a meaningless question without a clear definition of “targets.” Here is how I would advise a student in a few different scenarios:

A) Professor argues back, forcefully, against student’s viewpoint in class or in comments on papers, but grades the student fairly. In this situation, the student should suck it up; having your views challenged is part of the education you’re paying for.

B) Professor assigns the student a lower grade on an assignment due to the views the student expresses. In this case, the student can appeal to a department chair or dean and ask to have the work re-graded. There will probably be a high bar for this, since most university administrators will respect the professor’s professional judgment, but if the student can show genuine evidence of unfairness, such an appeal can succeed and I would recommend that the student pursue it. (Note, however, that this will NOT succeed if the student’s complaint is something like “My psychology professor marked me down for citing the Book of Proverbs instead of a peer-reviewed study in this paper about the effects of corporal punishment on children.” This falls under the general heading of “suck it up,” as above.)

C) Professor does something unprofessional or illegal, such as using abusive language to the student or making the student’s home address public and encouraging others to harass him or her. In this (fortunately very rare) situation, the student should document the incident and appeal to the dean.

My answers would be pretty much the same for incidents involving other students, except students don’t have the power to assign grades to their peers, nor is a student entitled to expect that other students will treat him exactly the same as someone with different political views (“I don’t want to socialize with you because you believe X” is perfectly fine from one student to another), so the “suck it up” bar is pretty high in that case. Active harassment, however, should be reported to a university administrator.

23

BTW, my response above assumes that the student has, in fact, taken it up one on one with the faculty member first; as Kimstu points out, that should always be the first step (unless the professor has done something egregiously abusive or illegal).

24

It’s been my experience that most professors don’t even have the energy to be ideological. You have to understand the worldview of a professor, every semester, you have a brand new crop of naive beginners coming into a field you’ve dedicated the last decade of your life to and your job is to patch them up to some bare minimum level of competency to send them into the next course. To them, this is their first time they get to intellectually spar with an ideology they disagree with. To you, they’re just one of a long line of students coming in making bad arguments because they don’t know better. And not only are they bad arguments, they’re not even original bad arguments because all beginners make the same set of basic mistakes and you’ve seen the same bad argument parroted out of dozens of students mouths at this point and it’s just boring more than anything else.

But you don’t blame them because they’re beginners so of course they’re going to make bad arguments, all you expect of them is that they’re at least willing to listen to why their argument is bad and adjust their thinking. Ideology barely plays a role in it, a bad argument is just bad. In fact, if anything, most professors I know naturally end up becoming harsher on bad arguments that happen to justify their personal beliefs than vice versa.

To put it another way, you know how you have those guys who this is their first job out of school and they just come into work already certain they have all the ideas about how to “fix” the company? And you know how fucking annoying those guys are as they walk around constantly opining about how if they ran things, shit would be so much better? And you know how they’re the same degree of fucking annoying regardless of what the idea is? It’s not about whether you’re conservative or liberal, just don’t be that guy and you’ll do fine in college.

25

I do work at a university. I have for nearly 30 years. And I’ve found it incredibly easy to get along with people of all political persuasions provided we do this one simple thing: DON’T DRAG POLITICS INTO EVERY SINGLE DISCUSSION.

And I mean from both sides. Jimminy cricket, who the hell has the time to be on their hobby horse day and night and night and day. Those people give me a pain and I shut my mouth and escape as soon as I can. You simply do NOT need to express yourself and your opinion every damned moment of the day. No. Just NO.

26

Some great advice so far. Especially from Kimstu, Shodan, and AHunter3.

27

All students are required to take so many humanities and liberal arts courses. I had some in sociology and philosophy.

28

Your [sic] pretty conservative. How did you handle the constant targeting by professors and verbal and maybe physical beat-downs by the leftist [sic] students? It must have been hell!

29

What a conservative who wants to express his/her views openly and engage in rational debate (i.e. in a history or political science class) should not do is to go to a college/university with a far-left reputation, unless that person thrives on confrontation and unpleasantness.

Certain well-publicized anecdotes aside, I have my doubts as to how common "bullying"of right-wing students is. Advice given previously about documenting concerns and taking them to the appropriate department chair or advisor sounds reasonable.

It works pretty much that way on the Dope as well.

30

That’s a broad overstatement. But even to the extent there is some truth to it, a class in Shakespeare shouldn’t be too hard for a conservative to stomach.

31

That’s a fairly broad brush to say “all students” – probably “the vast majority” is closer to the mark. Many students who are in specialized or technical fields like engineering likely have fairly minimal requirement to take such courses, and I would not be surprised if there are technical colleges or majors where there aren’t any such requirements.

Here’s the curriculum guide for chemical engineering majors at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Out of 133 credits required for a bachelor’s degree in that school, there is a requirement of 16 credits of “liberal studies,” of which at least 6 credits have to be in “humanities” (which can include foreign language), and at least 3 credits have to be in “social science.” That boils down to, more or less, one “liberal studies” class per year for those students.

32

To quote a t-shirt I saw at a con: “It’s called splash damage, you crybabies. Suck it up or go whine to the cleric.”

33

Not a college prof but was adjunct faculty for 5 years.

A kid goes to college not just to learn content but to interact with others with differing views and backgrounds–in the classroom, the dorm, and at social events. It’s a good thing. i’ve known conservative parents whose views of college have been warped by TV (such as all those news stories about controversial conservative speakers getting banned) and think their kid will be brainwashed into becoming a liberal OR shamed and ostracized for being conservative. Neither scenario is likely. Most conservative kids leave college just as conservative as they went in, but (hopefully) with a better understanding of the liberal side of things. And overall, 22% of college students identify as conservative. It’s not like a conservative kid is likely to be the lone conservative voice in a classroom.

The best way to prep a conservative kid for college life is to tell him to stick to his basic values but keep an open mind about what he hears. Encourage him to challenge his thinking. It won’t turn him into a liberal but will make him a more thoughtful, knowledgeable conservative who’s better able to explain and defend his principles.

34

(I teach hydrology in a geology department)

Along these same lines, the student should understand what they’re getting into when they enroll in particular classes. If a Young-Earth Creationist wants to be a mining engineer, (s)he’s going to have some classes that take it as given that the earth and the universe are 4.5 billion and 14 billion years old, respectively. You (conservative-student you, not anybody in particular) don’t have to accept that as a belief, but you do have to accept it for the purposes of those classes and base your classwork on accepted scholarship instead of your personal beliefs. Biology classes will assume that evolution occurs by natural selection; natural resource classes will assume that climate change is happening according to the scientific consensus. If you can’t work within these frameworks as a premise for those classes, you’ll do better to choose a major where you’re not fighting the theoretical underpinnings of the entire field.

Or you can pick one of those classes specifically because you’re looking for a fight. But that’s a pretty large investment of time and money to fail the class (because you failed to accept the premises on which it was based) and lose that fight (because universities generally accept the scientific consensus as the basis for undergrad education).

35

Isn’t that what I said? Your agreeing with me that a chemical engineer student has to take 16 credits of liberal arts. It’s the university goal of helping a student gain a broad education. And often a person really does gain some insight from say an art class they can apply to such things as even chemical engineering.

36

I was giving an example of “fairly minimal requirement to take such courses.” Again, 16 credits at UW equates to, in essence, one course a year, and said engineering student can likely meet most of those requirements with foreign language, music, literature, etc. – not the sorts of courses where one is necessarily likely to run into ideologial debate that’s going to challenge their conservative mindset (though I suppose it depends on the literature class in question).

Regardless, what you said was “All students are required to take so many humanities and liberal arts courses,” and it’s the “all” in that post that both Procrustus and I noted was likely an ovestatement.

37

Thanks for a great post. I cosign this (I’m also a professor, also in a field in which politics should rarely if ever come up.)

38

This is not a real thing.

In my experience, the conservative/liberal conflict in academia has boiled down to the fact that, every semester, there is a new conservative student who thinks “why is evolution real if there are still monkeys?” Maybe not that exact thing, but some other similar thing that comes up year after year.

I actually had a weird experience in botany class where the professor spent a couple of weeks explaining evolution and debunking all the counterarguments against it. I’m like… dude, it’s only plants. And I’m on your side, why do we have to do this? And then I took evolutionary biology and saw the whackos come out of the woodwork, and then I understood. Professors have to re-fight the same stupid battle every year.

In that light, my advice to conservative students would be: You’re not new. Everyone has already heard every single thing you have to say. Do not expect to star in this drama again; just ask for the script from previous years and respectfully go from there.

39

I went to college in Cambridge MA in the late '60s, early '70s. At the time I was very conservative. I also took a lot of philosophy classes. I never felt the slightest bit discriminated against.

Any answer should be exactly the same for a liberal student with a conservative teacher. Who do you think discriminates more: Harvard or Liberty University?

40

I’m at a loss as to how this could be challenging for the conservative student:

  1. If a rule is broken (either one of society’s rules - e.g. laws - or that of the university), report it to the authorities and trust that the establishment will deal with it accordingly.

  2. Otherwise, suck it up and deal. What are you, some kind of snowflake who needs a safe space where you are not exposed to things that might offend you? The world doesn’t work that way. Nobody owes you anything and you aren’t special just because you are you, so get over yourself.