I repeat: If conservatives want their criticisms of liberal-leaning higher education to be taken seriously, conservatives need to start out by confronting the biases against knowledge, science and fact within conservatism itself.
Rather than just whining about the occasional liberal professor saying something mean about a Republican politician in class, conservatives who value education need to be starting conversations with their fellow conservatives about the importance of taking, e.g., science education and factual journalism seriously and not using religious or ideological beliefs to dishonestly contradict or undermine reality-based findings.
Write letters to conservative publications and give talks at CPAC and what-not about how conservatives as a group need to reconcile themselves to the scientific validity of established theories of geology, astronomy, evolution, climate science and so on, even though they also have the freedom to believe something different as a religious doctrine. Get your fellow conservatives to stop throwing shitfits about the teaching of basic science in schools. And while you’re at it, push back against conservative conspiracy theories and mythmaking and dishonestly manufactured “controversies”. If you can’t effectively criticize liberal politicians or policies without making up bullshit and lies about them, you’ve got a much bigger problem than being “targeted” by liberals.
At present, all the conservative whining and sulking about the liberal-leaning academic establishment being “unfair” to them is ranting about the mote in their neighbor’s eye while complacently ignoring the log in their own.
It’s not “whataboutery” to point out the problems with conservative denial of the massive anti-science and anti-fact biases in their own ideological movement.
I took the OP’s question seriously starting from my first post in this thread, where I gave a thoughtful response about what conservative college students should do if they are on the receiving end of unfair liberal bias. But since then, some conservative posters in this thread have made it clear that all that really matters to them in this topic is stoking their own resentment and grudges against liberals.
At which point it becomes very appropriate to draw their attention to the fact that the conservative movement’s own anti-intellectualism and hostility to facts is the cause of far more damage to conservatives’ relationship to education and intellectual inquiry than being allegedly “targeted” by liberals is.
I hope you noticed I acknowledged and appreciated your responses.
As I said above I agree that a conservative student has no reason to go into a class and challenge their instructor on something like evolution. I try to tell them to focus on learning the material and getting the grade.
BTW, to me, remembering all the facts of evolution is hard enough like what eras lasted from when to when and what animals went extinct and such.
If true, I am in the minority of Republicans on this issue. But can’t we move Kent Clark’s question (what should a college do if…) to a different thread?
It could be construed as whataboutism. Just as the Soviet Union may have said, “you want us to respect human rights? What about hundreds of years of slavery in the US?”, you seem to say, “you want liberal professors to take conservative criticism seriously? What about all the times conservatives have dismissed science and facts?”
But I think the whataboutism is built into the original post, which declined to specify how the hypothetical student is being “targeted”. The student may not have done anything improper, we simply don’t know. I think the earlier answers (including yours) were on-point: don’t ask for trouble, just deal with it if you can, check school policies, document any egregious behavior, try and fix it on your own, and go to the higher-up if needed. I’m not sure what else remains to be said on this subject.
Stop right now, nelliebly! You’re giving away our whole nefarious plot :smack: to drive all the conservatives out of law school, which means there will be no conservative lawyers. With no conservative lawyers, the only people remaining to become judges will be liberals, which means liberal judges will dominate the courts.:eek: We could have accomplished this in a single generation if we liberals had simply kept our mouths shut. :mad: Now we’ve spilled the beans to loyal conservatives like Urbanredneck and Hurricane Ditka and they’ll tell the conservative movement to warn college students to *suck it up and endure the torment by liberal professors and students who openly oppose and target conservative students. *
Sure, it will be torture for these young conservatives to have to listen to liberal ideas day in and day out for four undergraduate years, plus more years in graduate school, but if they can just hold on until about age 30, they will have done their part in saving America from liberals like us.:):)
After all, America called on previous generations of young people to fight Nazis, the Japanese Empire, North Koreans and Communist Chinese, North Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern terrorists. Conservatives! Rally your youth. The current generation must do its part for the future of your nation by spending time with liberals on college campuses!!!
Sure I do. And do you want an LPN operating on your brain tumor? No? Then don’t cut college funding or dissuade conservative kids from going to college. That’s the point. I’m all for vocational programs and think some kids who are pushed to go to a four-year college would be better served by going to a community college and getting the training and coursework for the careers you mentioned. Too bad community colleges have faced funding cuts, too.
But I want to address another point with you. I assume you have a child who’ll be going to college soon. You’ll do him (or her) a real disservice if you tell him to just play the game, take in what he’s taught, and get the grade. He’d be so much better off if you told him to listen and then to research and formulate arguments–in his head if nowhere else–against what he disagrees with. He’ll more successfully argue for his views the rest of his life, and isn’t that what you want? Please don’t reduce him to being a robot.
Also, let HIM experience college and tell YOU what it’s like for him: I think you’ll be surprised at how much his reality differs from what you’ve been told college is like.
I’m a cybersecurity professor. Politics rarely, if ever, comes up in my classes. Hell, I even do a lecture on the DNC hacks in 2016 without talking politics. I set the expectation up front that I’m offering no political opinion and that we’re going to just talk about the technical issues, and I stick with that. I’ve never had an issue with it. I imagine it’s more difficult in social sciences to be totally apolitical.
That said, today’s conservatives, from the President to Republican Congresspeople to Fox News to Dinesh D’Souza to Diamond & Silk to various SMDB posters, categorically reject any information that doesn’t fit their ideology. To them, professional academics cannot be trusted because they’re liberals, and they’re liberals because conservatives don’t like their facts. There’s no accommodation that will ever be enough for people starting with the point of view that literally anything you say that challenges conservative orthodoxy is evidence of bias.
I’m an atheist, and I pretty much hate religion. If I turned up at, say, a class for adult converts to Catholicism and tried to debate the very principle of a divine being, and rejected the instructor’s authority to teach the class, they’d all rapidly grow tired of me too. I’d feel outnumbered and unwelcome in short order, and everyone would be happier if I just went off to some other venue. If a conservative, who rejects out of hand the very idea of professional academics, goes to college, what the hell are they expecting?
One should note that those lists are not actually of the “most liberal and most conservative colleges,” as you described them, but “the colleges with the most liberal and most conservative students.” The lists don’t specifically take into account anything about the schools’ doctrines, political bent of the faculty, etc. (though one might guess that there are strong correlations there).
What’s interesting about those lists isn’t the schools with the most-conservative students (which, not surprisingly, are nearly all either church-run, or military academies, or in the Bible Belt), but that the list of the schools with the most liberal students are nearly all very small liberal arts colleges. Nowhere on that list are the bigger schools with famously liberal reputations (like Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, etc.)
I like how the author discusses both the pros and cons of a liberal and a conservative school. Lets say you attend a small (less than 2,000) student school on the far end of either spectrum. Do you really get to know people that are that different from you?
This strikes me as unsurprising – students at private SLACs are almost all there because they were attracted to that particular school’s brand, while virtually all public universities have a generous admixture of students who are there because they happen to come from that state. Even if the school has a particular reputation, there’s likely to be a lot more heterogeneity. This is true even at smaller public schools; I teach at a regional state university that is effectively a SLAC, but we get a lot of students who apply simply because they are local, or because they want the small-college experience and this was the only public option in the state. Our students are pretty much all over the map in political views (though certainly more left-leaning than the state at large).
Oops. I did let the cat out of the bag. Blame my quixotic notion that education is good for everyone. However, we can take comfort in their responses in this thread, which show once again that when logic and reality clash with the party line they’ve been fed, the party line wins out. Furthermore, it’s so potent, it causes a sort of amnesia: they’ll soon forget all about this. Sadly, the plot is safe.
Probably not, but attending a larger, more heterogenous school doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll “get to know” many people who are different from you, either. You’re more likely to at least have passing interactions with a wider diversity of people at a bigger school, yes, but how well do you really “get to know” people that you only see in class, in passing in your dorm, etc.?
Even at a very large school, most students “find their tribe” – they’ll gravitate towards a formal or informal group that fits their interests and passions, be that the Young Republicans, a church group, a fraternity or sorority, a political action group, a D&D group, etc., and those are the people where they’re likely to be socializing and really actually getting to know each other.
I would argue the Obama birther stuff is no more of a conspiracy theory than the lefties who claim that Trump is a fascist or white supremacist Super Hitler (even though if he ACTUALLY WERE a fascist, everyone who criticized him would be in prison or dead, and in reality we see plenty of examples of people criticizing Trump without any fear). I know both liberals and conservatives. Many of my conservative friends are afraid to wear MAGA hats, but my liberal friends definitely do not seem afraid to criticize Trump.
I would also include things like how some on the left persist in believing that communism or genuine socialism are viable as other examples of left wing ideals that are clearly not upheld by reality.
While to you the privilege stuff may not seem important, I do think that the balkanization of our society by people who are trying to keep stirring up resentment between different races, social classes, sexual orientations, alleged gender identities, etc. has far more relevance to our daily lives than if someone accepts evolution or believes that Obama was born here (which clearly did not concern enough people for it to affect him being elected twice. The polarization of politics over the last few years is a serious social problem in my opinion. I am legitimately concerned about the possibility of something like a civil war if this polarization continues.
Great, I am glad that you can acknowledge this.
It may be true in some cases that conservatives are overreacting. However, since we have examples in this very thread of people generalizing about conservatives as being racist, ignorant/uneducated, I think it is also very likely that there ARE some genuine examples of prejudice against conservatives for simply expressing their opinions.
I am not racist. I don’t care about creationism. The kinds of things that I do care about include:
-I believe that capitalism is actually far more humane than socialism or communism.
-I believe that the Second Amendment is an essential to defending the First Amendment.
-I don’t believe it is sustainable to both allow unrestricted immigration AND allow immigrants to have access to social services here.
None of these ideas are fringe ideas, but would I ever openly discuss them in my college classes? Nope. No need to give ammo to anyone who might think I am a hateful bigot for not believing that anyone who manages to make it over our border is entitled to free healthcare, or that I am a monster for thinking that the Constitution means what it says and should remain that way.
I’ll play along while you show “Bowling for Columbine” in class (something a sociology instructor did back when I was in school), take my letter of recommendation from you, and then go on my merry way voting for who I want to vote for.
I myself completed a doctorate, so I do value education. However, I think it is totally reason to question if the way colleges and universities currently conduct "education"is actually a good thing for society, and does not mean you actually are opposed to actual education.
For example, I know of MANY, MANY people who have become trapped in student loan debt that they can’t discharge in bankruptcy and will never be able to pay off. I bet you do too. A liberal may look at someone with $100,000 in loan debt for a private school degree in Gender Studies and think that surely getting a more full understanding of the evils of “The Patriarchy” made the whole thing worth the cost, but a conservative will probably think that Gender Studies grad would have been better off going to trade school so they could have actually gotten a job and financial security.
We have enough young people out there who are getting degrees that they can’t pay off that I do think it has become a societal problem. I think it is totally fair to question if colleges are actually good for society when they are basically tricking gullible young people into ruining their lives with debt for degrees that won’t actually help them get ahead in the job market. MOST people go to college with an expectation it is preparing them for a future career, but that obviously isn’t the reality of what college offers many people anymore.
Great. I think that is how it should be, and I doubt I would have any issue with your class.
Having a degree in a social science myself, I do think it is possible to present information and current theories in social sciences without editorializing. It’s just that it is very easy to slip into making editorial comments, and right now professors don’t get much push back for doing so, so why wouldn’t they? It’s human nature that most of us like to share our opinions and tend to think that our opinions are more reasonable and factual than the opposition.
I think the disconnect we have here is that you don’t see that this is not just a “conservative” thing - liberals are like this too. You just don’t see that side of liberals because you’re not trying to challenge or disagree with liberals. If you did disagree with them, you would quickly find out that many liberals do not think that people who disagree with them on certain points of liberal orthodoxy should be allowed a platform to speak, will make vicious accusations against people who disagree with them, and will reject information that doesn’t confirm their predetermined narrative.
I actually think that it would be a very enlightening experience if liberals were willing to make an honest, good faith attempt to see what it is like to be conservative. If they were to post some conservative opinions on their social media and see how they get treated for expressing these opinions, I think they would be surprised at how even polite disagreement is received by many liberals. I think it would be quite shocking to many of them to see how quickly their “tolerant” liberal friends would turn on them for a simple difference in opinion.
You sound like a Christian who thinks they need to share the Gospel with everyone at all times and in every situation because they see sharing the Gospel as A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
People who have the opposite opinions from what you do see politics as being just as urgent and crucial as you do.
For example, I sincerely believe that abortion kills a human being and killing a human being is a big, big deal in my worldview. Nonetheless, I’m not going to bring up abortion at a dinner party or in a conversation with my boss. If I were teaching a college class, I would not make my students listen to a commentary about my opinion of abortion.
I have enough sense to know that even if a political issue is a big deal to me, that doesn’t mean that preaching about it all the time and everywhere is appropriate (or even helping to convince anyone). I advocate for pro-life issues in my free time and try to get along with pro-choice people in situations where abortion is not relevant.
:)