The New York Times cites a recent study as showing that professors' ideology does not influence their students' ideology. If one actually goes to the original source, however, one learns, that the scope of the paper is exceedingly modest. What it shows is that taking an individual class from a random political science professor cannot be shown to influence the a student's ideology by the end of the semester.
Even assuming that the study is right (and I have some questions about its methodology that aren't worth going into), what does it prove? For one thing, as the authors themselves suggest, political science is generally considered a much less ideologically evangelical field than, say, ethnic studies, women's studies, English, sociology, anthropology, peace studies, Middle East studies, and so on.
More important, I've never heard anyone claim that they think that individual liberal professors serve as Svengalis who lure their students into liberalism by the force of their personalities over one semester. Rather, the charge is that if students go to college for four years getting primarily a one-sided ideological perspective, this will have several results: (a) they will be more likely to think that anyone on the other side must be a moron, since none of their smart professors seem to hold those views, and often disparage them, intentionally or unintentionally; (b) the "bias," such as it is, will likely show up in what is assigned and talked about, rather than explicitly in classroom discussion. So students will get a lot of Rousseau and Fanon, little Adam Smith and Friedman. This means that students get exposed to the "best" thinkers on the left, but rarely to market-oriented or conservative thinkers, which both reinforces (a), and also gets reflected in how people who go into relevant professions such as journalism, foundation work, and whatnot go about their business, even if their underlying political views haven't change; and (c)the implicit hostility non-liberal students perceive in the academy discourages them from pursuing academic careers, which makes the left-wing dominance of the academy self-reinforcing.
A personal anecdote that may be relevant. Senior year of college, I took a political economy class from a very left-wing, but very fair-minded, Sociology professor. One of the books he assigned was David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics. Stockman was a libertarian Republican who served as Reagan's first budget director. At the beginning of the book, he provided a concise summary of why he thought limited government was beneficial to the American people. When the class discussed the book, one of my fellow seniors exclaimed, "This was very interesting to me! He seems like a good guy... I didn't know that any conservatives actually cared about people!." Kudos to this professor for enlightening my classmate, but how does someone get to her senior year of college without being exposed to the radical idea that not all conservatives are innately evil?
Anyway, I don't know whether, and to what extent, professors' ideology influences their students. But I don't think that this particular study tells us very much.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Do Professors' Ideology Influences Their Students' Ideology:
- Do Liberal Academics Make Students Liberal?:
[By the way, I thought I liked Rousseau until I actually read SOCIAL CONTRACT and realized how dangerous his policy prescriptions could be if taken to their logical conclusion.]
As the old saw goes, history repeats itself, first as farce (1980) and then as disaster (2008)
I doesn't know, but I are hoping that our grammar don't!
;-)
What possible influence could ideology have on teaching in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.? Very little at university level, which I'm guessing is why he focussed on the social sciences/humanities.
Complaining about liberals in ethnic studies is like complaining about conservatives in theological studies.
By growing up during the Reagan years, maybe?
Just kidding.
Sort of.
Well, you could walk over to Prof. Fritschler's office and see what he thinks:
Believe it or not, many liberals are actually interested in a diversity of viewpoints. It may or may not be uncommong for a liberal professor to batter their students with their ideology (though I never witnessed that) but neither is it uncommon for a liberal professor to engage in multiple sides of an issue for the benefit of their students. My evidence is only anecdotal, but the most liberal professor (we're talking self-admitted former hippie) also had us read and discuss several chapters in Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose", not to disparage them, but to honestly engage his ideas. We also read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", a book with a decidedly left-leaning interpretation of American history. Although no one had any doubt where he stood, he engaged the ideas of both authors fairly and thoroughly and encouraged us to make up our own minds. Bernstein eve has a similar anecdote, and yet somehow continues on insisting that liberals suppress conservative ideas?
This whole problem of "liberal bias" in academia is over-stated. Clearly, there are quite a few on the right who flog this horse over and over again not because they want the academic environment to be free of liberal bias, but because they want to impose conservative ideology instead. Here's a thought for them: instead of trying to force liberal professors to teach conservative ideology or whining about what is and isn't being taught, try encouraging conservatives to join the ranks of professors. I'm all in favor of more conservative professors, since I happen to think professors on both sides are inclined to be careful about how they instruct their students.
Also, since I happen to think that many people are conservative because they are insulated from anything outside of their own limited experience, it should come as no surprise that college can be a generally more liberalizing experience for many students. I certainly don't think college alone can turn many conservatives into liberals, but it can have the effect of at least making both liberal and conservative students more thoughtful.
Am I the only one who finds the idea of 15 year olds holding political views (beyond 'my dad doesn't like George Bush') a bit weird?
In an email to friends regarding this article, I predicted that there would be conservatives who'd refuse to believe it. Sadly, I'm proven right. It's hard to make an argument for needing a more conservative viewpoint in colleges, when conservatives themselves demonstrate this type of immunity to facts. Why exactly would I want my children to be exposed to conservative thinking, when the idea alone is apparently oxymoronic?
And the award for satirist of the year goes to...
Flash forward to the present where after 28 years in the software industry I went back for my Doctorate and now teach Information Systems, (non-tenure track). I still shut my mouth because the people in charge of P&T are flaming liberals who were young faculty in the 70's and now are in charge.
They tend to use the same rants they did before, anyone who is considered for tenure track positions has sociological bent publications. I.e. they reflect the Masters of the department. Am I surprised about this - NO!
Why would I expect them to be fair and open to other ideas, they were not then.
Should we have tried to get into Academia then, probably but we didn't and now IMHO we are paying for it.
So far, your would-be interlocutors have done a remarkable job of dodging your main points. Wonder why that happens so often...
Xant,
The problem is not a liberal bias, that's in some sense a contradiction in terms, as you point out. The problem (in my experience, your Friedman prof is very much an exception) is the popularity and prevalence of a continental philosophy that looks for a Right that doesn't much exist in contemporary America and thus misses the one that does, crucially the intellectual one, including the libertarians mislabeled as Right, and thus doubly misunderstood by by current academic fashion.
All this is a long way of saying that a student can get to be senior in college and not have much experience with that last group of conservatives because the other groups control the party, control College Republican groups, and dominate the media.
"It's hard to make an argument for needing a more conservative viewpoint in colleges, when conservatives themselves demonstrate this type of immunity to facts."
SMatthewStolte is also a human being, I presume. Perhaps we should just stick to computer-generated viewpoints to stay on the safe side.
Undermined...yeah sure. Perhaps, their small sample size of non-Democrat Professors (only 5) had something to do with their failure to pick up a relation.
Rousseau: one of the "best" thinkers on the left.
I do think you're missing out on the fact, though, that economics classes have become very conservative these days. My little sister came home from her first semester at Johns Hopkins and without provocation would start shouting laissez faire! at the dinner table. And lecturing us about moral hazard and the evils of minimum wages and tariffs and price controls.
they will be more likely to think that anyone on the other side must be a moron, since none of their smart professors
Do you realy think that a 20 years old student believes you or any other professor is smart?
Im a clasic liberal , i never , almost never, herad about liberal authors in law school.
I read for the first time Friedmann in an interview published in a left wing newspaper, the received money from the Sovier Union. The owner was a stalinist. The headline of the interview was a defense of state intervention in times of crisis.
One year after imy class was critized by the priest teaching us literature because we didint see the Hayek interview that a noted lert wing journalist broadcasted in the government station. I was 15 yo and didnt know of no liberal but the own Smith.
But i read ,when Hayek died, that he was a freemarket defensor so i look out for his Constitution of Liberty . Free to Chose was at my home library so at 19 years old i read Friedmann and Hayek,then Buchannan , Tullock . I boughtntheir Calculus in the University warehouse. Someone out there was also a liberal.
Then Becker, Coase, North.
And nobody guied me. By that time there was a so called neoliberal goverment,. They were neokeynesian like the Foreign Policy editor and the owner of a oat maker founded a freedom bookstore ythat allowed me to horad books of liberal before the internet allowwed me to foind Librty Found.
And i almost never or never had any liberal professor but for my parents .My father a democristian and amy mother a usa loving freemarketer.
Now im almost the only clasicc liberal professor among 4000
And they're always stupid and closed minded! That's why I never listen to them.
What I do remember is students being exposed to types of thought they had had almost no exposure to before -- not their professors' thoughts, generally, but assigned readings, mostly of what we would now call canonical authors. That seemed to matter somewhat.
I don't think libertarians are mislabeled. They've generally supported the Republican party for over 40 years now. Even now, with the evidence of the Bush Administration slapping them in the face, it sure looks like the majority of them will continue to give that support. That's pretty reliably on the Right.
Europeans do have a hard time with the American political spectrum (as we do vice versa). I think that's because on economic issues, the Democratic party would be center-Right on the European spectrum. That leaves the Republicans (in ideology, not necessarily in practice) seen as an extremist party.
I've always thought of Rousseau as being on the Right.
1. Most students come to college with a progressive bias acquired before they begin college, from a combination of their peers, teachers, parents, and the news media.
2. The leading cause of that bias seems to be a sense of guilt at being more intelligent and advantaged thereby, most of which came from peers.
3. During college, most students tend to sort themselves into peer groups, partly based on major or classes taken, and many of these groups become a process of mutual reinforcement that includes but is not controlled by faculty. Some of those groups trend either more or less progressive.
4. One of the most serious groups that unduly influences students is most law schools, where faculty seem to exercise more influence than happens in college classes, by the way they teach the subject.
5. Many of the progressives in academia experience shock when they get into nonacademic situations where their progressive ideals come into conflict with cruel reality and the pathologies of human nature. That causes many of them to swing to the opposite extreme, at least for a while.
Or, as the old joke goes:
A conservative is someone who got mugged.
A liberal is someone who got arrested.
A libertarian is someone who got arrested for shooting the mugger.
Because we could be supporting a candidate who favors social justice and the FISA reform bill? That would be much a much more sensible for those who favor liberty.
If you have libertarian leanings, the Republicans make for a sorry choice. The only thing worse is the Democrats. (Well, I guess the Greens would be even worse than them.) At least Republicans make the occasional rhetorical nod to smaller government.
Libertarians make for a cheap date...
If the argument is that conservatives feel that others are "hostile" to them, or even that they might be "disparaged", then boo hoo. Grow up and learn to defend your views with reasons, and these things will no longer be a problem. The U.S. is full of conservative Christians who believe themselves surrounded by hostility to Christmas, so forgive me if I don't get too concerned about all this supposed hostile disparagement. The only thing really hostile to Christmas is the fact that "Black Friday" is more interesting to a lot of people than attending Church, and I say this as a Christian who wants to see people get back to basics.
I find it highly unlikely that liberally-biased profs are somehow sinking the careers of conservative-biased students, which is the only sort of hostility that would be serious here. And even if I'm wrong, they have a lifetime ahead of working in businesses where the balance will surely tilt the other way. You don't like reading Fanon? Well, I didn't much enjoy reading Hegel, Kant, or that lousy Physics textbook, but such is life. Luckily I was able to visit libraries.
"Europeans do have a hard time with the American political spectrum (as we do vice versa). I think that's because on economic issues, the Democratic party would be center-Right on the European spectrum. That leaves the Republicans (in ideology, not necessarily in practice) seen as an extremist party."
That hits the nail on the head. The problem is:
(a) the political spectrum is not one-dimensional (there's a strong case to be made that a limited-government approach is more "progressive" in the long run: i.e. the American political spectrum is not just the European one shifted to the "right".)
(b) too many American academics adopt the continental view, often uncritically
How does someone conclude that an ignorant student is ignorant because she has never been "exposed" to an idea? I can tell you, I expose my students to plenty of things while they are freshmen--I even test them to be sure they know those things--and when those same students turn up in my upper-division and even graduate classes, I often have to re-teach them. It's heartbreaking.
Also heartbreaking is the difficult process of prepping a class. I start out with enthusiasm for all the many things the class ideally *should* cover, then have to face the realities of what students can be expected to learn in a single semester. (See above.)
Clayton: "So you must be tenured to hold a position this laughable. I'm sure you teach it to your students."
Unless, of course, it involves gay men. Particularly the ones who engage in icky sex.
It must be nice to be able to dismiss those who disagree with you who as evil. You must save so much time that others have to spend thinking. What do you do with all the time you saved? Have you written a book, or learned to play an instrument?