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Reading bias
Debates about bias in the classroom follow a predictable pattern, notes Reason's Cathy Young. Someone issues a study showing that America's faculties are strikingly politically homogeneous, and argues on the basis of that study that higher education is suffering from lack of intellectual diversity. America's faculties respond by either dismissing the study as methodologically flawed or by arguing that professorial political preferences have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom. The debate then stalls--until it starts up again somewhere else, with another study that argues much the same thing, and with more resistance from an academy that is not receptive to critique.
Young notes that the most recent round of this familiar cycle was initiated by the American Federation of Teachers, which issued a study last January entitled, "The Faculty Bias Studies: Science or Propaganda?" The report, which focussed in part on three of ACTA's studies (confusedly conflating two of them), was riddled with errors, Young notes; it mischaracterized some of the studies it criticized, and in its zeal to argue that studies of faculty political affiliation are methodologically flawed and therefore meaningless, it ignored the Higher Education Research Institute's 2001 survey, which corroborated the findings of the studies Lee sought to dismiss on methodological grounds. "Lee's attempt to challenge findings that most college professors are politically left of center seems pointless," Young notes. "The studies may be flawed, but their conclusion falls into the realm of the obvious."
What's not obvious, Young notes, is what the onesidedness of the professoriate means for undergraduate education. She's not convinced that faculty are "brainwashing" students, who, studies show, tend to leave college with many of the same beliefs they began with. But that doesn't mean there isn't a problem, she argues.
What is difficult either to deny or to quantify is that, especially at the more prestigious colleges and universities, the social climate fosters a strong presumption of liberal like-mindedness and a marginalization of dissent. Being left of center is the norm, and it is freely assumed that other people around you, be they students or faculty members, will share in your joy at the Democratic victories in Congress or your dismay at the passage of a ballot initiative prohibiting racial preferences in college admissions. This can translate into not only a chilly climate for conservatives but in some cases outright hostility.
If a student doesn't subscribe to the campus orthodoxy, the likely effect is not to convert her but to alienate her from intellectual life. Others learn only about a narrow range of ideas. One woman, a Ph.D. student in the social sciences at a Midwestern university, told me recently that when she started reading conservative, libertarian, or otherwise heretical blogs, "it was a whole perspective I had never been exposed to before in anything other than caricature."
When that's the norm, the harm is less to dissenters than to the life of the mind. It's not good for any group of people to spend a lot of time listening only to like-minded others. It is especially bad for a profession whose lifeblood is the exchange of ideas.
This is what ACTA has been arguing for years. Intellectual diversity is the essence of the university. Our lack of it is a pressing problem--one that is made worse by the academy's inability to recognize that problem for what it is. Everyone suffers when higher education operates as a monoculture--no matter what their views.
Posted by acta online on May 17, 2007 at May 17, 2007 10:38 AM
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Comments
Indeed, both liberals and conservatives suffer from the oppressively doctrinaire atmosphere of intolerant "belt-up-if-you-don't-agree-that-Bush's-evil" leftism in all too numerous humanities and social science courses. For challenges and thoughtful exchanges sharpen one's own ideas and thinking as well as those of one's adversaries. I remember a teacher, later friend of mine at my doctoral school, a life-long Labour supporter--though increasingly troubled by the dearth of political and theoretical diversity at university, used to invite me to so many of his round-table discussions and soirees simply (as a kind of "wake-up call" to colleagues and students) to represent an alternative view (of a right-wing Tory and admirer of the great classicist and clear-eyed Tory politician, J Enoch Powell) before those well accustomed to nodding in soporific agreement that our current president constituted no less than the eleventh plague of Egypt. . . .
Posted by: Jacques Albert at May 18, 2007 11:33 AM