Liberalism Is Inherently Offensive
Just saw this today - always interested in the Burgh news (also my 'dres' Alma Mater). I'm reading Zadie Smith's new book right now (courtesy of E.C.) and she's got her finger on the pulse about the weird anti-liberal ("liberal"?) movements at universities.
It amuses and horrifies me when conservative types go on about the liberal indoctrination at our elite seats of learning . . . Because thinking critically and broadly about various topics is a bad idea? Is there not maybe a pretty good reason why most academics/intellectuals tend to be more liberal? Maybe this is not because of some creepy system of indoctrination, but because the natural outcomes of critical thinking are a more nuanced understanding of the interconnections in society and in the world; the realization that unadulterated free market economics is a joke; the ideal that the state profits when its citizens are provided for; the reasons why gigantic SUVs are a travesty and planned communities are tacky.
Could it be possible that these stances are not anti-American, but just anti-ignorance?
Hearing on campus bias met with jeers
Panel investigating 'indoctrination' at state colleges
Thursday, November 10, 2005
By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
High on buzzwords but low on data, a controversial legislative panel created to investigate political "indoctrination" at state colleges held its first hearing yesterday at Pitt's student union.
By the end of hour one, student protesters had interrupted the hearing, strutting through the ballroom and chanting "HUAC, go away," a reference to the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee.
By hour two, the "select committee on academic freedom in higher education" heard its first overt mention of communism.
And by afternoon's end, the panel and its invited speakers had walked through a minefield of evolutionary theory, creationism and Holocaust deniers, issues that had varying degrees of relevancy to the subject at hand.
The inquiry is controversial because Democrats and college professors view it as a thinly veiled attempt by majority Republicans to stamp the autonomy, not to mention the liberal political ideology, out of academia. Republicans in the House say the inquiry is necessary because conservative students have reported being intimidated, or graded unfairly, by liberal professors.
State Rep. Gibson Armstrong, a Lancaster County Republican who spearheaded the creation of the panel, said that he's collected 50 complaints from students who say they feel intimidated, or "indoctrinated." Democratic lawmakers wonder about Mr. Armstrong's accounting methods, given that none of them has received a single complaint.
"I don't think we're brainwashing anybody, [which] is what you're implying," said state Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill.
The vote to create the panel -- which doesn't have any legislative authority and doesn't require the governor's signature -- was a party-line tally, 108-90. Democrats voted against it, GOP for it.
But it didn't take long for the first speaker, Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, to note that college professors at state schools tend to be more often liberal than conservative. Though there's no comparable study of Pennsylvania's state-owned and state-related universities, Mr. Balch examined the political donations from Pennsylvania professors, concluding that humanities and social sciences professors were more likely to donate to a Democratic candidate than to a Republican one, by a 30-1 margin.
As for Mr. Balch, a registered Republican, he's donated money to a group called "The Freedom Project," which is dedicated to advancing the Republican agenda and keeping Congress out of the hands of "union bosses, trial lawyers and campus radicals."
...
Third, the exclusion of alternative political viewpoints leads to unchecked advocacy and activism, which, in Mr. Balch's eyes, ought not be the mission of a professor, or a state university.
If colleges go out of their way to promote ethnic and racial diversity among the faculty and the student body -- a concept that Dr. Balch's group disagrees with -- then it should at least go to the same lengths to promote diverse political viewpoints, he said.
...
The "academic bill of rights" is redundant in the places where it calls for a grievance procedure for students who feel they've been graded unfairly or capriciously, because all universities have such grievance procedures in place, said the two professors. Where the "bill of rights" is not redundant, it is either unnecessary or downright dangerous.
Mr. Moore said he is skeptical of the claims of rampant political intimidation or unfair grading that are collected mostly online, without any fact-checking.
Oy. For more commentary on this, see the PA ACLU website.
It amuses and horrifies me when conservative types go on about the liberal indoctrination at our elite seats of learning . . . Because thinking critically and broadly about various topics is a bad idea? Is there not maybe a pretty good reason why most academics/intellectuals tend to be more liberal? Maybe this is not because of some creepy system of indoctrination, but because the natural outcomes of critical thinking are a more nuanced understanding of the interconnections in society and in the world; the realization that unadulterated free market economics is a joke; the ideal that the state profits when its citizens are provided for; the reasons why gigantic SUVs are a travesty and planned communities are tacky.
Could it be possible that these stances are not anti-American, but just anti-ignorance?
Hearing on campus bias met with jeers
Panel investigating 'indoctrination' at state colleges
Thursday, November 10, 2005
By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
High on buzzwords but low on data, a controversial legislative panel created to investigate political "indoctrination" at state colleges held its first hearing yesterday at Pitt's student union.
By the end of hour one, student protesters had interrupted the hearing, strutting through the ballroom and chanting "HUAC, go away," a reference to the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee.
By hour two, the "select committee on academic freedom in higher education" heard its first overt mention of communism.
And by afternoon's end, the panel and its invited speakers had walked through a minefield of evolutionary theory, creationism and Holocaust deniers, issues that had varying degrees of relevancy to the subject at hand.
The inquiry is controversial because Democrats and college professors view it as a thinly veiled attempt by majority Republicans to stamp the autonomy, not to mention the liberal political ideology, out of academia. Republicans in the House say the inquiry is necessary because conservative students have reported being intimidated, or graded unfairly, by liberal professors.
State Rep. Gibson Armstrong, a Lancaster County Republican who spearheaded the creation of the panel, said that he's collected 50 complaints from students who say they feel intimidated, or "indoctrinated." Democratic lawmakers wonder about Mr. Armstrong's accounting methods, given that none of them has received a single complaint.
"I don't think we're brainwashing anybody, [which] is what you're implying," said state Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill.
The vote to create the panel -- which doesn't have any legislative authority and doesn't require the governor's signature -- was a party-line tally, 108-90. Democrats voted against it, GOP for it.
But it didn't take long for the first speaker, Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, to note that college professors at state schools tend to be more often liberal than conservative. Though there's no comparable study of Pennsylvania's state-owned and state-related universities, Mr. Balch examined the political donations from Pennsylvania professors, concluding that humanities and social sciences professors were more likely to donate to a Democratic candidate than to a Republican one, by a 30-1 margin.
As for Mr. Balch, a registered Republican, he's donated money to a group called "The Freedom Project," which is dedicated to advancing the Republican agenda and keeping Congress out of the hands of "union bosses, trial lawyers and campus radicals."
...
Third, the exclusion of alternative political viewpoints leads to unchecked advocacy and activism, which, in Mr. Balch's eyes, ought not be the mission of a professor, or a state university.
If colleges go out of their way to promote ethnic and racial diversity among the faculty and the student body -- a concept that Dr. Balch's group disagrees with -- then it should at least go to the same lengths to promote diverse political viewpoints, he said.
...
The "academic bill of rights" is redundant in the places where it calls for a grievance procedure for students who feel they've been graded unfairly or capriciously, because all universities have such grievance procedures in place, said the two professors. Where the "bill of rights" is not redundant, it is either unnecessary or downright dangerous.
Mr. Moore said he is skeptical of the claims of rampant political intimidation or unfair grading that are collected mostly online, without any fact-checking.
Oy. For more commentary on this, see the PA ACLU website.
posted by Joolya at
7:08 AM
5 Comments:
When these issues come up, I am always surprised that conservatives don't realize the obvious solution to this problem: pay professors more, lots more.
It's not that evil liberal university control freaks sit back and reject countless conservative job candidates. Most conservatives in this country are simply not pursuing careers in anthropology, history, or literature departments. This could be for two reasons: first, because complex critical thinking is not in the best interest of adherents to a conservative mindset (a distinct, if somewhat unkind, possibility) or second, because almost no conservative is going to spend 11 years in school to have a starting salary of 40k/ year.
So, if you want to draw more conservatives into traditionally "liberal" branches of academia, advocate for doubling, or hell tripling, the average professor's salary.
This liberal academic will not stand in the way.
Wow, 40K a year . . . Dare to dream . . .
Also, you've got to really LOVE research to spend 6 yrs in grad school PLUS another 3-6 yrs as a post-doc during which time you are getting no kind of 401K or other retirement plan.
Haha! Nice one Boomy. A seminar I organise had a discussion about this recently, and this conservative guy told us that the reason humanities academics are generally left-wing is because there is no competition in academia. I think he meant price competition, in that we don't sell our ideas for profit. This apparently means that we like state-ownership and monopolies. Rather absurd, eh? Considering historians are possibly the most competitive people in the world, this was a bit much.
No competition in academia? Is he smoking crack? Modern biology is all about the grant whoring.
It would be extremely helpful for you if you were actually living with a smart conservative who would explain you, beyond any reasonable doubt, why these communist preconceptions that you have been hearing since you were a little kid from people who were more or less disconnected from real political questions and sometimes from the real life are completely stupid, disconnected from the real world, and an intellectual dead end.
Left-wing bias at the universities exists primarily because of the existence of fields in humanity that are *defined* to promote various kinds of feminist and similar bigotry. No reasonable right-wing person would every become a professor of "Women's studies" because "Women's studies" has become a synonym for the feminist confusion.
Because the number of professors in these humanity and social-science fields is so high and because the scholars in other fields are often sissy, easy-to-be-manipulated, and unable to think critically, they often buy the left-wing crap from the left-wing scholars in the humanities. The mechanism of spreading of this socialist, environmentalist, and other crap ideology is nothing else than infection. Makes sense? ;-)
Of course that this is not devastating for the society in any major way because the people who actually understand the world also decide about a large portion of the commercial sector, and some of them work in the think tanks that are mostly right-wing. It's just a problem of the narrowly defined academic world that it restricts the intellectual diversity and amount of inspiring thoughts - which is why the Academia ends up being as illuminated and as intellectually/politically diverse as the Pyongyang Parliament.
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