Inside Higher Ed (via Instapundit):
One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. The argument is probably made most directly in a film much plugged by Horowitz: Indoctrinate U."
A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study — notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor — finds no evidence of indoctrination. Despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America’s youth — or scaring them into adopting new political views.
A comment on the IHE article provides the obvious objection:
Am I the only one who sees a problem with the way the data was collected, as self-assessment, rather than measured against some objective criteria? If a student grew up in a conservative household, but were a bit more liberal than their parents, they may rate themselves as moderate or slightly liberal when they enter college. After spending 4 years exposed to predominately liberal professors, their views may have moved significantly to the left, but their frame of reference has also shifted to the left, so they perceive themselves still being moderate or only slightly liberal.
I certainly knew some students at Brandeis who started as moderates, but thought of themselves as conservatives by the time they graduated, even though their views had shifted at least somewhat leftward, because they were in fact moderates relative to the population as whole, but conservative relative to Brandeis faculty and student politics. In other words, the study proves nothing (or, more precisely, doesn't provide persuasive evidence).
UPDATE: There were also some students who were driven to the right by some of what they encountered in politicized departments like Sociology and English. True story, recounted to me by a classmate and friend:
English T.A.: "Was anyone in this class disturbed, as I was, by the absence of women characters in this book?" Student, frustrated by weeks of this sort of thing: "What do you expect, it's a book [Moby Dick] about whaling! There were no female whalers!"
No, there's no liberal indoctrination, just as the sky isn't blue.
What proof is there that it is happening? The fact that colleges offer "liberal" classes or that college professors tend to be "liberal" isn't proof of any effort to indoctrinate students. College students may be impressionable but the vast majority of them are also adults. How is that we allow them to drive, smoke, vote and sign up for the opportunity to fight and die overseas, but put them in a classroom and we assume that they are unable to think for themselves?
This is why law professors should be banned from practicing social science without a license. The point of a study like this is not to prove anything, but to cast some empirical light on a much-disputed question that -- so far -- has existed in a data-free environment. Irrespective of whether or not you agree with their conclusions, the authors are to be commended for at least trying to let a little reality inform the debate.
As to the "methodological" critique, it cuts both ways: a conservative student from a conservative family (who therefore might rate herself "moderate" on the initial survey) might -- after four years of exposure to all those nasty liberals -- realize that she is, in fact, conservative, and say so on the exit survey, with the result of appearing to have been "indoctrinated" in a conservative direction.
In other words, the self-evaluation aspect may well go to the validity of the measure, but it does not necessarily result in bias in one direction of the other.
For me the issue is, are students being punished for their views?
In my experience, I never was. Nor were any of my friends. I had some professors who disagreed with me and some who were more perplexed than anything, but I never felt "threatened" or that my personal / political views had anything to do with my grade. I did sit in a class once for a week where I felt that the professor might be intolerant of dissent, so I left (the class was "into to 3rd world topics" and the professor was an editor of a Marxist studies journal...I guess I shouldn't have been surprised). After the prof in the first day asked how we could reconcile "the global capitalist system ... the end goal of which is the complete destruction of life in the biosphere" with blah blah, etc etc, I knew it was time to leave.
Now, if students ARE being punished for their beliefs, that's a clear problem.
On the other hand, the stupid little "dumb conservative" jokes about Bush, Arnold, etc etc, which are pretty universal get tiresome and annoying, but that's all they are--dumb.
Overall, as a history major and history masters student, I don't believe that indoctrination is a problem.
1. When the humanities departments are so heavily skewed it makes their views sloppy and flabby.
2. It rewards students for writing papers simply to mirror their profs' views. That fails to develop their critical thinking and it makes them cynical about the academic part of university life. (For profs who bemoan the undergraduate fixations on beer and sports, this point may be worth some meditation: why should students engage in spirited academic debate if their profs don't do it either?)
In other words, Professor Bernstein, you're saying that your undergraduate experience TWENTY YEARS AGO justifies a conclusion about how things are today? Pardon me if I don't think that's at all persuasive.
That difference might be subtle, but it's important.
Anyway, I only remember two instances of politicking by professors in my major. One was in engineering economics my sophomore year: the pronouncement that providing universal high-quality healthcare to everyone in America is economically infeasible and there's a choice that must be made between universal low-quality healthcare for everyone or high-quality healthcare for some and no healthcare for others. The other was in construction management my senior year: the pronouncement, buried in an overview of the outlook for construction jobs, that the latest highway funding bill was too porky.
That's so tolerant of you, Steve2! After all, we must loathe those with whom we disagree. You wouldn't be a future faculty member, would you?
And professors tend to be liberal because academia is a lifestyle choice; if you wanted to make the big bucks you would have picked more of a Bill Gates career path: drop out of Harvard to start your own business, not spend years getting a PhD followed by the attempt to get a tenure track job followed by the attempt to get tenure.
Students pick their own courses.
Indoctrination-Theorists seem to feel like bright-eyed High School students are buckled into chairs and forced to take Feminist Lit 101. Ridiculous.
The courses that so enrage them -- Fem Lit, Ethnic Studies, Animal Rights -- are generally self-ghettoized in their own departments. The only students taking the courses are those who have already bought into the world view. They're left to begin with, and they stay left.
What this means for "indoctrination" is that vast numbers of students -- those in the hard sciences, undergrad-business, technical, etc. -- never see political bias. Where in the course would it possibly fit in?
There is a border area of possibly-politicized fields. Economics, Psychology, Political Science... most of the Social Sciences... plus Literature. I suppose it's here that any indoctrination would take place. I would think that this would be empirically testable -- compare undergrads in these fields to science-only types.
My own experience in Poli Sci at Cal was that the courses always leaned liberal, with lip service paid to conservatives. There was usually also a few hardy conservative/libertarians to watch the Professor. And the fellow students already seemed political, which was probably why they were in those fields to begin with. Economics was rigorously neutral, unless the bias was so insidious I couldn't even tell.
I've got to quote this for truth.
Teachers have the right to have their own opinions and state their own opinions, as long as they can do so without violating their job description or offending enough people for the union equivalent of the free market to smack them around.
But they have a hell of a lot of power in situations, and the potential for abuse means that an idealogical monopoly is dangerous.
Just from high school systems, I've seen modern history and political science classrooms stamped with campaign posts (for just one political party, by a teacher known for certain cognitive biases), and a case where a student was flagged for counseling after writing a pro-gun paper and showed no other risks.
If students have anything approaching freedom of speech, it should be rather evident that this isn't acceptable : putting forth mandatory opinion questions and punishing those who think 'wrong' regardless of the quality of their work or completion of assigned projects is just tasteless.
I agree with Prison Rodeo that the study can be skewed in other ways. But in the absence of an objective indication of students' views on particular issues, rather than self-identification, it's impossible to know what if anything the data show.
In law school the only thing that really ticks me off now is professors inventing or misrepresenting the facts of cases. They can offer whatever opinion they like and I can evaluate that for myself, but when a professor starts inventing facts to support their opinion it makes it pretty hard to take them or their opinion seriously.
As a fairly recent Brandeis grad, I can assure you that it's not.
Sorry, but students do not pick their own graduation requirements.
What finally did in my academic career was the bullshit being peddled in the Humanities and Ethnic Studies classes I was forced to take. As I was by this point no longer a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 18-year-old, but was already a husband and father, with a real job and real experience, I decided enough was enough.
All I know for sure is that conservatives are whiny little bitches when it comes to this issue.
Its nice that you characterize classes that interest others as "phony baloney" while elevating the classes that interest you. That is really first class.
Last time I checked, those "phony baloney" classes that you are bitching at HLS are not required. If you took them because you thought they were, and thus found yourself involuntarily indoctrinated, your a moron, in addition to being an arrogant and condescending towards the interests of others.
I think your points are a good example of precisely why we shouldn't take complaints of indoctrination seriously from the whiny windbags on the right.
Every single one of my poli sci professors is a committed leftist. Every. Single. One. Mind you, they are of different flavors, from the radical feminist, to the Marxist, to the Keynesian Welfare statist. The problem is not any of this, rather, it is the questions that go unasked that hampers our study.
Yes, the Marxist can have important observations, as can the feminist, or whoever. The problem is that questions that I, as a religious conservative, see are not even asked. And if I ask them or see something, they are often dismissed within the pre-existing paradigm that the professor holds to.
So, as a conservative, I do relish the challenge that is often put before me by these intelligent people. In fact, I love them because of it. But by not reading people who really question the "system" as conservatives, students are being devalued.
More whining.
Well, at least you have the balls to speak up. I know some conservatives with a victim complex so deep that they are afraid to state their opinion. Conservative wimps, go figure.
But, it seems to me that you have a desire for your ideas to not be dismissed. That is, you desire to be agreed with. While that is perfectly natural, you should recognize that you are actually lucky to be in an environment where you get to hone your arguments and your thinking.
No one said life was easy as a committed rightest.
As if religious conservatives don't dismiss the ideas of others based on "pre-existing paradigms." Look, you should be glad that they are using pre-existing paradigms to "dismiss" (i.e. disagree with) your ideas.
Last time I checked, religion was a "pre-existing paradigm"
=)
What is really interesting to me, is that conservatives use propaganda to try to indoctrinate us into believing we are being indoctrinated by liberals.
Why shouldn't the fact that women were excluded from the profession of whaling bother us? =)
I think it is funny when conservatives get frustrated with ideas that they disagree. I just wish that the would admit that this is what this is all about: conservatives who are frustrated that they are disagreed with.
And as has already been mentioned, classes like feminist theory or animal rights or whatever are pretty self-selective. While colleges do require certain things for graduation, I am not aware of a college requiring 6 hours of Introduction to Radical Feminist Deconstruction of the Evils of Conservative Patriarchy in order to graduate.
Of course, as I mentioned, I went to a big public university. From what I've heard the more elite universities tend to be more polarized and political, but then, they produce fewer graduates as a whole, and you would think that the students going into them would be be mentally tough enough to handle it. If anything, most people I know who are strongly conservative considered dealing with overtly liberal professors to be a sort of character-building experience.
Going to a top law school wasn't really that much different. More liberal profs, perhaps, but they weren't much more vocal about their views or dismissive of conservative views than I noticed in college. Every once in a while there was something obviously liberal thrown off, which I found irritating even when I agreed with, but I think it was pretty obvious and not really indoctrination at all. The liberals nod, the conservatives roll their eyes, most people just surf the web, and then class and life move on.
Chill
Yeah, there are lots of nifty Web quizzes, but I'd hazard they have all the rigor of the Sunday horoscope.
That's precisely incorrect. In my studies of mathematics, I was consistently indoctrinated using the most dogmatic propaganda imaginable. If I dared to question the fundamental assumptions underlying the courses, I was penalized with low grades for my answers.
The question that people should be asking about dogmatic leftist instructors teaching dogmatic leftism in university courses is not, "is this indoctrination or propaganda?", but rather, "is there any value at all in indoctrinating students with this particular variety of propaganda--let alone enough value to justify the high fees and massive government subsidies that support it?" And once questions of that type start getting asked, a lot more classes than just the Marxist ones start looking awfully questionable...
I was late signing up for an excellerated Latin class. I entered the third day having read and done the first week's readings on my own and was eager to compare my work with the classes' to get a feel for the tempo of the teacher.
So seconds into the class out come several fresh handouts. Twenty pages or so. More than I expected for a language class. As I grew apprehensive I moved to quickly scan the title pages.
Two Maureen Dowd articles and one Paul Krugman.
The class passed with a long back and forth on these and finally in the last 5 minutes we had a very comprehensive test on the earlier assignments. This was the first mentioned of Latin. I asked the other students and they said it had been the same on the first two days.
Will this kind of silliness change anyones ideology? I doubt it. Did it destroy the value of the class? I thought so.
It seems to me what is left out of the question of this thread is the effect on the purpose of the Academy by the purported bias.
I went to school to be exposed and challenged by the range of human thought. I expect a strong bias limits what I will be exposed to or how well others' positions will be articulated. This is not what I hoped for.
Then doesn't that call into question the author's determination to write on such a one-sided topic? Leaving aside his crass insensitivity to the whale, I mean.
I would not mind attending a class taught by a Marxist. Might learn a little more about Marxist. What I WOULD mind is being graded by a committed Marxist, or anyone too committed to any specific view, simply out of concern that they would view any dissenting view as stupid rather than a matter of disagreement. And I'd find a bit annoying that I was expected to... dare I say conform? to the teacher's expectations.
It is however comforting to see that, at least for others than the quite young, that indoctrination often has the opposite effect. A friend of mine was in a North Vietnamese POW camp, and tortured. He remarked the NV were taught along Pavlovian lines, with the note that Pavlov's dogs learned more rapidly after subjected to stress when their lab flooded. But the dogs did not blame Pavlov for the flood. Change that and ... as he put it, before being tortured, the POWs were professionals. Didn't like commies, but had been sent to fight them as a professional duty. After being "brainwashed," they were profoundly changed. They now wanted to kill every commie in the universe, burn their bodies, raze their cities, and strew salt on the rubble.
That happened to me, and delayed my leaving liberalism by about a year, because I just didn't want to be associated with the assholes who were the visible conservatives at my college.
Your mileage may vary, and I don't mean to assert that all conservatives at every college are obnoxious.
Although, when I think about it, most people, liberal or conservative, who speak up to make some distinctly political point (inevitably without reason or logic) tend to come across as jerks. The people who are bearable tend to be the most open-minded or interested in genuine debate. This doesn't stop them from having political views, of course, but their way of discussing them in public is much more open.
I don't believe the "indoctrination" itself is occurring, though I do believe self-selection among those who go into academics skews the population leftward. However, the professors who are unabashed in their "fetishization" of liberal beliefs are those whose views I least respect or consider. Particularly in law school (and most demonstrably in all of my criminal law classes), these professors steadfastly refuse to discuss or even acknowledge alternate viewpoints, and have given me miserable grades or patronizing platitudes for voicing any counter-arguments (and here I thought a good lawyer should be able to argue both sides of any case...). This is the primary factor that has led to my thorough cynicism about law school education and those who are responsible for it. I could not, in good conscience, recommend my law school to anyone else considering it, now that I know how stonewalled anyone with an unbiased, information-seeking perspective would be received. I was born and raised by a lawyer, so I have been prepared for this type of cynicism for as long as I can remember. But this is sickening, especially considering I still call myself a liberal (and a fairly adamant one at that, too).
I still believe Horowitz is wrong, but those who insist no liberal bias exists, or that if it exists, it's harmless, are showing a level of ignorance equal to (if not worse than) Horowitz's, at least in my experience.
the students think so as more apply every year than there is available slots. companies seem to think so also because they continue to require a college degree for even basic low level jobs. the general public seems to think so also as there is no large movement to end the subsidies and there tends to be a large backlash when the subsidies are cut.
i also like how you phrased the question: "this particular variety of propaganda". it implies that you think some propaganda is worthy of being indoctrinated...and i would wager that it is propaganda that you happen to agree with.
without an objective way to measure this, i don't see a way to separate "the teacher failed me because i'm a conservative" from "i'm claiming the teacher failed me because i'm a conservative because i don't want to own up to my mistakes". and if people turn in work that is anything similar to the arguments (and i use this term very loosely) made on this website, i would be shocked if the latter wasn't the true reason.
it actually makes sense this way.
excellent point.
but admitting that the "bias" comes from a few bad actors or their personal temperament would prevent them from claiming that all of acadamia is biased liberally. and once you admit that only a relative few number of prof are responsible, you'd also have to admit that the bias goes both ways with some conservative professor tying to indoctrinate students also.
and for the record, i've spent some 7 years in high education so far. i've seen only 2 professors that were openly biased. one liberally and conservatively, both in the english department. the kicker? only the liberally biased prof went out of his way to make sure that other viewpoints were heard. he even went so far as to cede the podium and sit in the back of the class while students expressed counter viewpoints.
They turned country and her reputation and economy into shit
and they still talking about mythical liberal indoctrination.
Douchebags.
Then there were professors like the freshman-level history prof who thought that a good set of textbooks for history since the civil war included Chomsky, Ward Churchill, and Jimmy Carter's new book on Israel. Was every word out of his mouth free of factual information? No, I'll certainly admit that I learned a few things. However, surely you don't blame me for having a little skepticism about the quality of the information he was presenting? To say nothing of his shockingly ignorant discussion of the decision to drop a bomb on Hiroshima... a topic I've studied independently, including the sources he cited, and some fairly thorough debunking of the same. If he's demonstrably wrong where I happen to know better, how far can I trust him on topics where I don't have deep knowledge?
And no, Free Trader, it wasn't an optional class - state-mandated for all degrees. Oh, I'm sure that I could have found another professor if I had the time to invest, but as a graduating senior, the choice is between taking what fits in the schedule or putting another six months into school. And I did pass the course, though not with the As I earned in my other subjects; frankly, I couldn't give a damn what the grade was.
Fortunately, the former type of professor was more common, and I learned a secret of good classroom discussion - don't try to score points off the professor, even if they're absolutely, blatantly wrong. I had one of my political science professors assert, with a straight face, that a law mandating a balanced budget would be effective, because it would prevent future budgets (which are, er, superceding laws) from being passed if they weren't balanced. Oh, what can you do there?
In the end, I learned more from the professors I disagreed with because they forced my to better defend my views. I can think of no better training for a conservative lawyer than spending seven years arguing with liberal professors.
Seven years? It took you seven years to get through law school? Wow, I'd hate to be one of those people you are publicly defending.
:-)
(Yes, I know, you're including college. But that's not obvious from the context.)
If one accepts the general trend towards becoming more conservative as one gets older, this study ignores the possibility that, were it not for the alleged indoctrination, the students would have become more conservative during that 4-5 year time period instead of staying the same or moving slightly left.
With that inspiration, I say we just cut taxes some more -- you know, borrow another $50 billion or so from China to finance the *inevitable* surge in federal revenues that will not only balance the budget but put in surplus. Then we can take some of the ever growing surplus and buy out all those liberal professors on college campuses. More of the surplus can be used to hire *true conservatives*.
Then we cut taxes some more. And pretty soon we'll be swimming in rebates. Hasn't history proven that tax cuts pay for themselves . . . and 200 years of liberal college professors have ruined our country?
I am not upset by the lack of females but I think the reply quoted is weak.
Whales like Moby Dick aren't very common either, nor were captains like Ahab. But Melville thought they made the story more interesting so he included them anyway. And why not, he was writing fiction, not a textbook on whale-hunting.
But that is probably what the TA meant. Melville just didn't think it would be interesting to write about females, because otherwise he could easily have added them to the story.
I think it's possible that already liberal students might lean left, but that's probably as much from being among students who are liberal than professors. Spending a few hours a week in class (say 3-5, for the students who actually bother to show up) is hardly going to change someone's political views. And if it does, the student was either not very conservative, not very intelligent, or both. And the far-left excesses certainly drive away some moderates.
Not a trivial issue.
The other question is hinted at: What would have happened if the faculty(ies) had been more balanced?
The implications drawn seem to be that the indoctrination was minimal. That evades the question of "compared to what?".
But he did. There's a passage about female *whales* (discussed by Camille Paglia in her "Sexual Personae") in which Melville gives a pretty disturbing image of the cow's milk mixing with her blood after she's been harpooned.
Without knowing which university is being discussed, how can anyone know whether or not these comments are anything more than fictional rants?
Of course, I guess the standard was set by DB in the recounting of his unnamed friend's "True story".
Of course, anyone with the temerity to write, "...conservatives like George Soros..." will find these factors unpersuasive.
While I like Moby Dick just fine the way it was written, women at sea, while not common, were not unheard of in the age of sailing ships. More than a few sea captains took their wives (and sometimes children) aboard during that era.
One may want to read Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus to see how one of Melville's contemporaries handled the task.
Survival of the fittest, huh?
Better to be taken by pirates than to endure more nagging.
I can give you examples if you want. I can give you a hundred from the liberal (very liberal!) arts college I went to first, but you would have to see what it was when you applied to that school. Not really any fraud going on there.
But later (after changing my own views) I went back to school at the University of New Mexico. And I had the strange experience of being taught about Bush's evil war during an upper level biochemistry course, for example. It was not on topic, but it was intimidating to be shouted at about it by a gruff, angry faculty member who had power over my future career. There were many more examples, and it was not isolated to that department.
Luckily, as soon as I realized I was going into economics, not biochem, I scurried out of that place - the econ department was not pretty.
On top of that, probably way less than half of the students I've known had more than a passing interest in politics, and a far smaller fraction were remotely ideological. So the idea that universities are hotbeds of radical politics just bewilders me (outside of maybe womens and queer studies - but really, what do you expect there?).
There's clearly a left-wing slant to academia, but that's a different issue from whether there's left-wing "indoctrination".
And thats how it was, BLAW 375 is a core requirement for the program, so i didn;t have a choice but to sit there and listen to how and i quote "Soldiers are running around baghdad right now shooting innocent people" God forbid we discuss something relevant, like SOx, or environmental regulations, bribery and corruption, anything. Instead what we get is a dried yup old hippy who wants to go on rants about the 4th amendment is dead, and the government is racist because it abandoned New Orleans. And the exams? a mid-term and a final which were 20 one-word definitions of terms. I learned nothing, and for the priviledge got to sit there from 7 to 10 PM every thursday night for 3 months.
If you want to discuss a Melville work that does include a woman, why not "Typee"? Not only is a woman a main character of this story, but she's not white, which kills two birds with one stone.
I don't deny that universities provide a useful function. It's just that that function--selecting students for admission, then gauging their ability to master a largely arbitrary collection of advanced skills and concepts--is mostly unrelated to the specific content of the particular courses they teach.
i also like how you phrased the question: "this particular variety of propaganda". it implies that you think some propaganda is worthy of being indoctrinated...and i would wager that it is propaganda that you happen to agree with.
It has nothing to do with what I "agree with". Certain skills and concepts--a small subset of those taught in universities--are actually useful to the students who are taught them. The rest are simply hurdles that universities test students' ability to clear--either because the challenge separates the stupid and/or lazy from the rest, or simply because the professors have the power and inclination to set them.
Eventually, much more efficient processes will be found for identifying and training effective professionals. In the meantime, proponents of universities in their current form will continue to bicker pointlessly over which universtity courses and instructors provide "education", and which merely "indoctrinate".
That said, I don't have a problem with books that descibe all-male (or all-female) environments. They do exist, and they make interesting hothouse experiments. Writers love that sort of thing.
On the main topic, I found law school to have a liberal bias, but not just any liberal bias. The thing that annoyed me was the insufferable upper-middle-class-ness (please excuse the awkward formulation) of it all. It wasn't about working people at all, and my definition of "left" is "that which emphasizes the interests of working-class people." The liberal bias in law school was mostly about race and gender.
Where class came into it at all, it was in discussions of poverty and the underclass, and the poor were treated as recipients of liberal benevolence rather than as people capable of pursuing their own interests. This has an element of truth to it, but it ignores the many not-so-wealthy people who DO act successfully in their own interests. Actually, it does more than ignore them -- it treats them with contempt, and frequently identifies them as the source of social problems.
Academics at elite schools really don't have much use for the successful working class or lower middle class. Too close to home, perhaps?
Donations streamed in. The Cal Patriot (magazine) went from crappy newsprint to full-color glossy. And when a run of the magazines was stolen by the left? Acres of donated cash.
Eventually the left wised up and started to ignore them. Somewhat weirdly, this was bad for the conservatives. They had a business model that was based on enticing the left into doing retarded things.
What it demonstrated, for me, was that Cal at that point was a largely apolitical school with a moderate-but-static lef t-wing. In fact, it was kind of amusing how the very-left City had clearly begun to despise the hordes of moderate, upper-middle class white/asian kids that had taken over their bastion of nostalgia.
Melville could have added Chinese mandarins and a talking dog as well, but those would merely be distractors and inauthentic. Captains' wives in towns like New Bedford, Mass., would watch for the return of their men, away on voyages that could be three years long, on "widows' walks."
Tony, why do you assume that only liberals make the lifestyle choice to be academics?
This is not what I said. I said that academics tended to be liberal.
Is it because the only people who are interested in being rich are conservatives like George Soros, Al Gore, Bill Clinton - and, since you mention him, Bill Gates?
A lot of people are interested in being rich. Becoming rich is not the goal of entrepreneurship, but a byproduct. Entrepreneurs' beliefs in free markets, individual responsibility, and reward for effort tend to make them non-liberals.
Bill Gates -- entrepreneur
Bill Clinton -- retired government employee who is capitalizing on his fame.
Al Gore -- see Bill Clinton
George Soros -- ???
I managed to fulfill all my graduation requirements while avoiding any classes with political overtones (in both subject matter and pedagogy) at an enormous state university in the east. It got a little dicey in Philosophy of Law and Social Psychology a couple times, but the professors weren't afraid to note dissenting views on punishment and de-institutionalization.
My advice to downtrodden conservatives - study science and use available resources to understand your "breadth" electives.
Having collected my share of mistakes and learned or not, I agree, in part.
However, if the prof is not only the interpreter of facts, but the primary source of facts, the unwary undergrad can be misled. I was, a couple of times.
Yeah, and my friend's sister's house burned down because of a Glade plug-in. It seems that most house fires are caused by Glade plug-ins.
Recounting an conservative urban legend goes beyond the old saw of the plural of adecdote is not data.
Fifteen years later, the same people will have learned how to cope with adult life, and will no longer be freaked out by spending their own money on housing and food. Chances are that the whole college gang, even the one who lived in an attic for a while trying to be an artist, will be established and doing reasonably well. And so they will probably conclude that the overwhelming majority of people can manage their own lives.
Unless they become social workers, community activists, or urban schoolteachers, in which case they will be looking at an unrepresentative sample of the population all day.
so true. being the inquisitive type, i tested this (obviously not a scientific study) by writing two papers in the same class, the first being very consistent with my teachers VERY liberal/feminist views. the other one referenced various aspects of how male AND female privilege which i knew would piss off somebody who believes that men are the oppressors and women are the victims.
the results were predictable. i got an "A" on the first paper and a "C" on the second. of course i can't prove they were equally well researched, argued, etc. but they were. i had a major in college where i wrote a LOT of papers and i know a good paper and a bad one.
it was really pretty blatantly obvious.
this was in grad school, for psychology. the prof was a TOTAL leftist. she was also totally cool to me before the 2nd paper. after i wrote that paper, her friendly button completely turned off. she wasn't hostile, just completely ignored me.
again, not a scientific experiment. but leftists don't like their sacred cows challenged.
Laurentian University.
However, I think both you and Free Market has misunderstood my point. The problem is not with Leftism, it is with a Leftism that is pervasive and does not give serious debate on the other side. For example, my comparative political economy class does not have ANY reading supportive of neoliberal or libertarian thought on economics. At all. It is wholly bad. There is not even a mention of an important thinker like Milton Friedman, who has been very influential politically.
Funnily enough, the most "conservative" moments have come from the philosophy department, who read people like Alasdair MacIntyre (I know that it is problematic to describe him as conservative). Yet, After Virtue is an important look at modern society (just as Nietzsche is an important read). My complaint is not so much that they don't ask the same questions; it's that they are ideologically blind to particular worldviews. Worldviews that are more prevalent than theirs.
In "Foreign Policy of Major Nations" the professor, in his opening remarks the first day of class, infomed us that we would discuss "in depth the failings of the boob currently befouling the White House." This was in 1995, and he was referring to Bill Clinton.
The other, vocally liberal professor (an African Immigrant and a Muslim), I took for 3 different classes. In one of them - "Post War Politics in the Middle East and North Africa" - I wrote a paper that was heavily critical of American actions in the 1991 Gulf War. I took some fairly extreme positions, mostly out of sheer perversity. During my in-class presentation of my paper, the professor absolutely shredded me and my work. He based his excoriation on two things - poor work (perversity is not good scholarship), and anti-Americanism. He told me, in a private conference, that as an immigrant who was ecstatically happy to be a permanent resident, he simply could not comprehend how an American could ever take the positions that I had taken, and he could not in good conscience reward a student who took those positions.
So much for liberal indoctrination.
Oh yeah, no Feminism, Gender Studies, Race Studies, Queer Studies, or anything of the sort ever fell into my elective basket. I did take a comparative religion class from a Buddhist, however. No indoctrination there, either - I was already a Buddhist - and he made no effort to convert anyone.
(Well, for the same reasons Melville's book doesn't have women.
It's not about that.
Melville wasn't making a book about gender relations or women-at-sea; he was making a book about [to vastly simplify] obsession.
That a gotterverdammte gender-obsessed TA decided that's not even the most appropriate, but even a significantly appropriate lens to view Moby Dick through says more about the TA and feminist lit-crit theory than about Melville.
But that's the problem with all theory-based literary criticism, not just the feminist variety.
Imagine what a post-colonial theorist would do to Moby Dick?
Gah. All of this reminds me of Spivak's useless and nigh-incoherent attempt to frame Frankenstein as a homoerotic fantasy. Bollocks, say I.)
This answer just seems to confirm my original claim. you like what you find useful but you don't like what you don't find useful. Different people will find different things useful. And if students knew what they would find useful beforehand, there would be no point to college...they could just go to the library and pick up a book or two.
Also teaching students something that turns out to not be useful is a far cry from "indoctrinating" them with "propaganda" as was your original claim.
In the meantime, proponents of universities in their current form will continue to bicker pointlessly over which universtity courses and instructors provide "education", and which merely "indoctrinate".
yourself included. your tone gives the impression that you think you have some unique insight on what is useful and what is not and on what is "education" and what is "indoctrination". I highly doubt you do.
my original wager seems to have paid off.
Furthermore, do we have a reason to suppose that the self-identifying college students are less likely to vote or "live out" their identifications than the population at large? The criticism of the study assumes that there's a "real" set of views behind the warped self-identification; yet this means that the college student sub-set of the population lives with an internal contradiction of saying they are one thing while they live and believe and vote as another. In short, they suffer from false consciousness. Now what crazy liberal theory was it again, that had proposed much of the population had that problem?
I had the opposite experience. My ultra-conservative and libertarian economic professors drove me to the left. Having their faith reaffirmed on a daily basis in theoretical fantasies like the efficient market hypothesis made a lot of supply side economics seem like a fraud to me.
They do seem that way until you ask them what they think of Social Security.
To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, anyone who signs up for a class named something like "Race and Gender and American Apartheid" knows what they are signing up for, and deserves to get it good and hard.
See "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845-1851 (The American Maritime Library ; V. 13).
This overlooks that these classes are often required. You have no choice about taking them, other than leaving school and trying to start somewhere else that you hope is better.
For example, this recent article talks about a 3-class, year long course required of EVERY student that is called Dimensions of Culture, with one term each on Diversity, Social Justice, and Imagination. They are not optional.
I got degrees in Computer Science and Physics from a science-oriented university. I was basically never exposed to politics or PC-isms in my course work - which is as it should be. They taught what I was there to learn.
Contrast that to my girlfriend, now in college. She took a course in Managing Non-Profit Organizations, and the course is basically an ego-platform for the professor's pet causes. The class was required to attend a protest about water polution. They were also required to spend one afternoon planting trees. She got extra credit for going to a symposium he spoke at about failures in Capitalism. This has to do with managing a non-profit how exactly?
She also has a statistics professor (which I'd think would be a pretty safe topic) who spends about 20 minutes EACH class period giving criticisms of the Bush administration.
Do either of these things actually indoctrinate anyone? Unlikely. Are they inappropriate and a complete waste of time with regards to learning any subject matter? Absolutely!
That is what bothers me most about the liberal bias of these professors: Its not that "poor, poor conservatives can't listen to ideas that threaten their world". What bothers me most is that they feel they can inject their views into the class content, whether it has anything whatsoever to do with the course or not. She's not paying the school thousands of dollars so that her professors can advance their pet causes and opinions; she is there to learn the subject matter.
Dude, this isn't about Melville's choices in narrative, at least once he'd decided to write about whaling. There really were no female whalers. There weren't. Occasionally whaling captains would bring their wives along, but Ahab wouldn't have done so. I mean, hell, the guy threw away his pipe so tobacco wouldn't distract him from The Whale.
Deconstructing it in its social context, this whole question is really saying "don't you think it would have been better if Melville had understood that 160 years in the future people would be upset that he hadn't invented a female character, completely lacking in verisimilitude thought such a character would be, in order to assuage the political concerns of his 21st century readers?"
The only situation, I believe, in which this issue creates problems, is when people are graded based on belief, rather than based on a good piece of work.
I've had only one professor who I felt was extremely biased. It was an Anthropology course and was focused primarily on moral relativism. We watched a video, that showed a tribe in New Guinea that used to do the following: Invade another tribe, win, kill and eat the males, rape the women, and make the children into slaves (I wish I was making this up). To use relativism to back up such actions as this is a far cry from saying one cannot judge another persons regular cultural norms from their own perspective. Even though I ended up getting the A, I had to lie on the final paper quite a bit.
wish i could say the same for you...you're still a jack@ss.
why the ellipses at the end of my quote? you don't know you quoted the entire sentence, right?
but you would still not have any evidence or data to support the conclusion that "indoctrination" was the cause of the shift in the viewpoint. a shift in beliefs is not in and of itself evidence that indoctrination has occurred.
Okay. Which was it? Were they not discussed or were they portrayed as bad?
As to his girlfriend's field trips in her course on Managing Nonprofit Organizations, it's unclear whether they were useful field studies (How does a nonprofit mobilize volunteers and reward them in ways other than financial compensation? What is the relationship of nonprofits to the for-profit capitalist system? cooperative? competitive? symbiotic? parasitic? All of the above? How do you make your nonprofit effective in its approach?) or time-wasters. He suggests his opinion, but it may be that he and his girlfriend missed the point of these field trips.
On the other hand, I really liked whit's very specific story about one feminist professor he dealt with, which he ends with this startling observation:
Boy, rightists sure like to generalize from a single data point.
i just find it funny that the results of the study above is rejected because it relies on subjective reports made by the students even though the original claims of liberal bias are based on subjective reports made by the students.*
*I realize there are some claims have tape recorded evidence to back them up, but 1) they are vastly fewer in number and 2) the few claims at UCLA that i looked into turned out to involve quotes taken grossly out of context or involved the conservative student asking a loaded string of question to illicit the answer he wanted.
(1)
(2)
Still the narcissistic, wet-behind-the-ears medical student unable to supress the obnoxiousness. ("Braying jackass" refers to Brian K's penchant for declaring his position the winning one and mocking others who think differently with a "HA-HA-HA.")
caseframe was dropped by the state AG? I ask because it seems to me that what Taylor and Johnson documented in their book, and what little has come out following the declaration of absolute innocence of the accused players has been quite a bit of material which seems to support the claim that there is a problem with ideological orthodoxy on college and university campuses.While it is easy to pick apart Horowitz, who is not a careful scholar, there seems to be a reasonable volume of work to suggest that the claims of ideological intolerance, enforced left of center orthodoxy, and group think is (1) not new, and (2) does not seem to have been diminished over 15 - 20 years and (3) may be well entrenched. So why aren't we talking about these works? Things like Gross and Levitt _Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science_; Ellis _The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America_, and Kors and Silverglate, _The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses_. From my rather limited perspective, the abuses documented in book after book seem to be very believable and comparable to some of the events I have observed on campuses in my own state.
I think it will be very interesting to see what comes out in depositions when the suits against Duke administrators reach that point. I also think that the unwillingness of Duke to admit any kind of wrong-doing, or to take any sort of disciplinary action against any of the faculty or administrators named in _Until Proven Innocent_ who seem to have acted in unprofessional ways, to say the least, suggests to me that there is a problem. The fact that so many members of the team and their parents believe that there was a miscarriage of justice, and they are willing to sue to get public admission of the wrongs done to their sons suggests to me that there is a problem. Now, a lot of academics would like to sweep this under the rug, and they find plenty of nice excuses for why this is not a problem. But, again, no one at Duke wants to have a public airing of what happened. Why are they so adamant that this should not be discussed? Why is Duke's Board of Trustees willing to spend so much money to pay damages to players and their families and try to buy silence? Why are other players and their families willing to put so much money into the suit to get this into the public record? "Nothing to see here, no leftist orthodoxy here, just move along folks . . . " I will be interested in seeing what it is that they are so desperate to not let us see. I suspect it will be much more convincing than Mr. Horowitz's book. Much more in line with what Gross and Levitt, Kors and Silverglate, Ellis, and Taylor and Johnson have been telling us.
This is why "social science" is a complete misnomer, and the application of the term "soft science" is even generous - it has nothing to do with science at all.
Science is the collection and testing of data to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Casting empirical light to let a little reality into a debate, with no thought of proving or disproving something, has nothing to do with science at all.
just because i know you like it so much, here it is...
HAHAHAHA