Several people have asked that. I don’t think we’ve seen an answer yet, though maybe I’ve missed it.
My conservative brother in law once said to me that he was puzzled that most of the intelligent people he knew were liberals.
I said to him that that was an opening so wide I wasn’t even going to bother to walk into it.
(Intelligence certainly doesn’t correlate anywhere near perfectly with going to college; but I think in this case the principle’s the same.)
– I have no idea whether most colleges tilt left or not, and it probably depends both on where one draws the line between left and right, and whether one’s talking about the faculty or the student body or the trustees, who might or might not agree with each other. But if people in the business of knowing things do tend to that political bent: consider the possibility that the cause and effect relationship may be that truth might, indeed, have a liberal bias.
Question for college professors: What should a conservative do?’
That question is hypothetical. Mine is real.
What should colleges do when the state legislature cuts funding to the state colleges because the idiots in the legislature, many of whom got their degrees from those same schools, want to teach those damn liberals a lesson? And to top it off, they pass a law authorizing the state schools to charge students higher tuition?
As Hurricane Ditka and Urbanredneck are so aptly demonstrating, the Republican party has become the anti-higher education party. When one side begins with the premise that education is bad, it’s difficult to counter with reason.
It’s not about what’s best for the students: it’s about punishing liberals for being liberal. College faculty tend to be Democrats? Then cut funding to public colleges and universities and fire a bunch of the faculty. That’ll show 'em.
You can tell yourself whatever you want to comfort yourself. It’s not that education is bad. Liberals are bad. “Education” / academia (at least the modern-day American version), is infested with liberals. It’d be alright if we could get rid of them.
And since you know you can’t get rid of liberals in education—because a very large number of smart, well-informed, intellectually gifted people have a liberal worldview, and modern conservatism in many respects is actively repelling smart, well-informed, intellectually gifted people—you figure that the next best thing is to destroy and undermine education itself as much as you can.
Liberals aren’t the ones who look bad in that scenario.
That’s a good point. There’s nothing stopping a conservative from starting an institution of higher education that caters to conservatives. You could do it mostly online for not a huge investment.
And replace them with who, exactly? I’ve heard multiple conservatives complain that going into education (at any level) is stupid, because if one is going to spend all that money to get an advanced degree, one is an idiot not to go into the private sector, where the pay is much better. My wife had multiple degrees and taught in public schools for 35 years, and she endured people telling her that for. . . 35 years.
Of course, there are some conservatives who go into education just for the opportunity to spread their world view to a generation of young minds. But that just flips Urbandreck’s hypothetical shoe on to the other foot, doesn’t it?
As the University of Phoenix and others have shown, there is money to be made in tertiary education. And Bob Jones, Liberty, and some other conservative universities are full, so there is presumably unmet demand. It would seem someone could gather up the conservative academics feeling stifled in liberal institutions and have a nice little business educating the masses of conservative students who aren’t being well served by current options.
Clearly, reporters and academics can’t be fact finders, because they’re liberals. And we know they’re liberals because they don’t find facts that agree with conservatives.
Does that pretty much sum up your reasoning, such as it is?