[quote]Joe Weider wrote:
POX, all due respect, but if you’ve got kids at Harvard and Yale who’re forced to falsify their political views–because politics has been pushed into everything at places such as those–in order to get decent grades, then there’s a problem. I’ve forgotten where the story was, I’ll try to find it. I read it in the past 6 weeks.
That’s not education, that’s indoctrination. And, lest we forget, indoctrination is responsible for some of the greatest horrors in man’s history, from the rise of the Third Reich to simple down home racism.
[/quote]
Find the story. I would like to read it because that isn’t what heard on this particular show. His son wasn’t planning on attending the schools you mentioned.
The Show was Scarborough Country, and the host that wasnted to send his kid to college was Joe Scarborough.
But further, you miss the point, and wide.
“Since when are we judging education for our kids by the political views of the teachers?”
Since we started taking an interest in what they are being taught. This excuse won’t fly - the entire point of the counterculture revolution in academia was because the Lefties didn’t like what they were being taught. If you’re spending thousands, often tens of thousands, for yourself or your kid to be fed an ideological dogma at the expense of learning to think critically and pursue the truth, you demand change.
“It has almost become a lynch mob mentality where anyone who doesn’t agree with the extreme conservative right is viewed as near insane and looked upon as someone who needs to be shunned by society.”
This is pure horseshit. Conservatives, like liberals and everyone else in between, think they’re view of the world in the superior one. But as far as academia goes, conservatives generally are interested in balance, not domination. Diversity, at its best, should mean one thing - diversity of thought. In the clear absence of that at higher levels of education, conservatives want to take their moeny and education to a place that respects their ideas.
“I truly don’t understand why people can’t see the bigotry and closed-mindedness in that situation.”
In academia? Larry Summers, a left-of-center former Clinton Secretary of the Treasury suggested that men and women have cognitive differences that cause them to possibly be better at different professions and fields of thought. He was nearly pilloried for expressing his thoughts - and was asked to resign.
There is closed-mindedness in academia, you just need to get educated on which side it’s coming from.
“Conservatives now see themselves as “above” the opinions of any others in America.”
Again, nonsense. I’d say that conservatives find themselves as fairly well in tune with America, given the recent election trend.
Conservatives can get proud about their ideas like anyone else, but your charge is more apt for the Left - urbanized, insulated elites who sneer down at the so-called common man for not being Enlightened. At least, that’s my perspective from the last 4 years and previous 2 election cycles.
I’d search high and low for a college that I thought was truly fulfilling the mission of education, especially if at the end of it, I’ll be $100,000 poorer.
Right on Campus
Conservatives begin to infiltrate the left’s last redoubt.
BY BRIAN C. ANDERSON
Friday, January 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no. Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest?.?.?. affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.
The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with “creating a hostile climate” for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers’ lack of school food permits.
The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of America’s college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe’s monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to mom and dad’s own values.
But the left’s long dominion over the university–the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed–is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn’t coming from the schools’ faculty lounges and administrative offices, of course. It’s coming from self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy’s elite gatekeepers.
There have always been conservative students on campus: More than a half-century has passed since a just-matriculated William F. Buckley published “God and Man at Yale,” lamenting his alma mater’s secularism and launching the author on his now-legendary career. But never has the right flourished among college kids as it does today.
The number of College Republicans has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six years ago, to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College Democrats’ 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members). College Republicans are thriving even on elite campuses. “We’ve doubled in size over the last few years, to more than 400 students,” reports Evan Baehr, the square-jawed future pol heading the Princeton chapter. The number of College Republicans at Penn has also rocketed upward, says chapter president Stephanie Steward, from 25 or so members a couple of years ago to 700 today. Same story at Harvard. These young Republican activists, trudging into battleground states this fall in get-out-the-vote efforts, helped George W. Bush win.
Other conservative organizations, ranging from gun clubs (Harvard’s has more than 100 students blasting away) to impudent newspapers and magazines, are budding at schools everywhere–even at Berkeley, crucible of the 1960s’ student left. And right-of-center speakers invited by these clubs are drawing large and approving crowds. “At many schools, those speeches have become the biggest events of the semester,” Time magazine reports. One such talk at Duke, by conservative author and former Comedy Central host Ben Stein, attracted “a bigger crowd than the one that had come to hear Maya Angelou two months earlier.”
The bustle reflects a general rightward shift in college students’ views. Back in 1995, reports UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, 66% of freshmen wanted the wealthy to pay higher taxes. Today, only 50% do. Some 17% of students now value taking part in environmental programs, half of 1992’s percentage. Support for abortion stood at two-thirds of students in the early 1990s; now it’s just over half. A late-2003 Harvard Institute of Politics study found that college students had moved to the right of the overall population, with 31% identifying themselves as Republicans, 27% as Democrats and the rest independent or unaffiliated. “College campuses aren’t a hotbed of liberalism any more,” institute director Dan Glickman comments. “It’s a different world.”
Youthful attitudes are volatile, of course, but this rightward trend may intensify. In a mock election run by Channel One, which broadcasts in public schools, 1.4 million high school students re-elected George W. Bush in a landslide, with 55% of the popular vote and 393 electoral votes–greater than the 51% of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes he actually won.
Today’s right-leaning kids sure don’t look much like the Bill Buckley-style young Republicans of yesteryear. “Conservative students today will be wearing the same T-shirts, sneakers and jeans that you find on most 19-year-old college kids,” says Sarah Longwell of the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes the Western intellectual tradition on campuses. Jordana Starr, a right-of-center political science and philosophy major at Tufts, tartly adds that you can spot a student leftist pretty fast: “They’re the ones who appear not to have seen a shower in some time, nor a laundromat.”
The new-millennium campus conservative is comfortably at home in popular culture, as I’ve found interviewing 50 or so from across the country. A favorite TV show, for instance, is Comedy Central’s breathtakingly vulgar cartoon “South Park.” “Not only is it hilariously uncouth, but it also criticizes the hypocrisy of liberals,” explains Washington University economics major Matt Arnold. “The funniest part is that most liberals watch the show but are so stupid that they’re unaware they’re being made fun of,” he adds, uncharitably. The young conservatives, again like typical college kids, also play their iPods night and day, listening less to Bach and Beethoven than to alt-rock, country-and-western and hip-hop.
Yet the opinions of these kids are about as far from the New York Times as one gets. Affirmative action particularly exasperates them. Chris Pizzo, a political science major who edits Boston College’s conservative paper, the Observer, points to wealthy Cuban-American friends from his native Florida, “raised with at least the same advantages and in the same environment that I was,” yet far likelier to get into the top schools. Where’s the justice in that?"
Worse still, many students argue, preferences carry the racist implication that blacks and Hispanics can’t compete on pure merit–an implication that holds minorities back. “Affirmative action has a detrimental effect on the black community, whether or not we’re willing to admit it,” says Jana Hardy, a biracial recent Claremont McKenna grad now working in urban planning.
The war on terror, including in Iraq, drew strong support from most of the students. Typical was Cornell classics major Sharon Ruth Stewart, mildly libertarian–except when it comes to fighting terror. “We have to use any and all means to defend ourselves from the terrorists, who hate the American way of life even more than the French and Germans do,” she says. “That means bunker-busters, covert ops–whatever ensures America is safe.” University of Maryland junior Nathan Kennedy is just as tough-minded. “I am full-fledged on board with the Iraq war,” he says. “We’ve brought the fight to the terrorists’ door, dealing with the radical fundamentalist Arabs who want us all dead.”
On cultural issues, the students had clearly reached their own, sometimes idiosyncratic, conclusions. Yale senior Nikki McArthur (a big Metallica fan) is, like most of the students I questioned, ardently pro-life–“but not because I necessarily think that an embryo is a full human being.” Rather, she argues, “I think that a culture in which abortion is widely accepted is one in which people have a wrong understanding of children and sex. Children should not be considered burdens.” Jordan Rodriguez, a rugged-looking Evangelical Princeton undergrad, Deke pledge president and hyperachiever–he was varsity baseball and editor of the literary magazine at his San Antonio high school and a violist in the city’s Youth Philharmonic–is as hard-line as they come on abortion. The practice is “ethically abominable,” he says; it should be regarded as “a form of homicide and prosecuted as such.”
Many of the students, especially the women, value getting married and raising a family with a fervor that would thrill the Family Research Council. “I’m an old-fashioned girl,” avers Cornell’s Miss Stewart. “I think it’s wonderful when a mother can spend the majority of her time devoted to her child’s early years. I plan to do just that.” Reports University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox: “My biggest surprise in teaching here is that I am coming across growing numbers of postfeminist college women. They tend to be very bright and–other things being equal–would normally gravitate to feminist academics.” Instead, Mr. Wilcox notes, they’re looking for “a sane path forward for the revival of courtship and family life.” Polling data suggest that such sentiments are increasingly widespread. A 2001 survey, for instance, found that 88% of male high school seniors and 93% of females thought it extremely or quite important to have a good marriage and family life.
Yet for most of the conservative students I interviewed, traditional values did not extend to homosexuality. Though few support gay marriage, fewer still want the Constitution amended to ban it, and most are OK with state-sanctioned civil unions for gays. “I don’t buy the prevalent argument that recognizing gay unions would undermine the institution of marriage,” says Vanderbilt sophomore Anne Malinee, the strongly pro-life editor of the Vanderbilt Torch, the school’s conservative monthly. “Of all the issues elected officials could be focusing on, why this?” Similarly, Bucknell history and economics major Charles Mitchell, culturally conservative in many respects, isn’t worried about gay marriage. “I believe that homosexuality is a sin, because that’s what the Bible says, but I also believe that if two people of the same sex love each other and can get a priest to marry them, the propriety of that is none of the state’s business.”
What accounts for the growing conservatism of college students? After 9/11, many collegians came to distrust the U.N.-loving left to defend the nation with vigor. As of late 2003, college students backed the war more strongly than the overall American population. Notes Edward Morrissey, “Captain Ed” of the popular conservative blog Captain’s Quarters, these kids “grew up on .?.?. moral relativism and internationalism, constantly fed the line that there was no such thing as evil in the world, only misunderstandings.” Suddenly, on 9/11, this generation discovered that “there are enemies and they wanted to kill Americans in large numbers, and that a good portion of what they’d been taught was drizzly pap.”
Yet a deeper reason for the rightward shift, which began well before 9/11, is the left’s broader intellectual and political failure. American college kids grew up in an era that witnessed both communism’s fall and the unchained U.S. economy’s breathtaking productivity surge. They’ve seen that anyone willing to work hard–regardless of race or sex–can thrive in such an opportunity-rich system. “I’m only 20, so I don’t remember segregation or the oppression of women–in fact, my mother had a very successful career since I was a kid,” one student observed in an online discussion. “I look around and don’t see any discrimination against minorities or women.” Left-wing charges of U.S. economic injustice sound like so much BS to many kids today.
The destructive effects of “just do it” values on the family are equally evident to many undergrads, who have painfully felt those effects themselves or watched them rip up the homes of their friends. They turn to family values with the enthusiasm of converts. Even their support of homosexual civil unions may spring from their rejection of the world of casual hookups, broken marriages and wounded children that liberalism has produced. “Heterosexuals have already done a decent job of cheapening marriage on their own,” observes Vanderbilt’s Miss Malinee.
Conservative ideas take on even greater allure for students when the authorities say they’re verboten. From pervasive campus political correctness–the unfree speech codes, obligatory diversity-sensitivity seminars and school-sponsored performances of "The Vagina Monologues’–to the professorate’s near-uniform leftism, with faculty Democrats outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 (at Williams, it’s 51 Dems to zero Republicans), everything aims to implant correct left-wing attitudes in student brains.
“There’s a natural and healthy tendency among students to question the piety of their teachers,” Penn history professor Alan Kors noted a few months back. “And for so long the pieties, dogmas and set of assumptions being taught on college campuses have been found on the far left.” Says Daniel Flynn of the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that trains young conservative activists: “The intention of many in academe is to evangelize left-wing ideas, but in effect what they’re doing is often the opposite: piquing interest in the other side.”
Katherine Ernst, a perky, blond and diminutive recent New York University grad, confirms the point. Like many students I queried, Miss Ernst already leaned right when she arrived on campus. But the left-wing propagandizing of her professors made her conservatism rock-solid. “One professor, right after September 11, gave a terrorist-sympathy speech that went, you know: ‘Oil, oil, oil, they’re poor, we take advantage of them, it’s really complicated, blah, blah, blah.’ It was something that I and many other students living in our financial-district dorm really enjoyed,” Miss Ernst says acidly. “The worst professor I ever had, though, was for a course in administrative law,” she recalls. “Every class–no exaggeration–included at least five references to ‘Bush was selected.’?” A final straw for Miss Ernst came when a professor–“a for-real communist”–walked out of a class he was teaching “to take part in some stupid protest march.” So there you have it, says Miss Ernst: “You pay thousands and thousands and the prof takes off to carry a ‘no justice, no peace’ sign around Union Square Park. How could anybody exposed to this kind of stuff not become a raging right-winger?”
Chapel Hill journalism major Debra McCown would agree. At her school, she complains, the liberal profs tend to “ram their political views down students’ throats.” One incident particularly outraged her. “I watched as a classmate, required to attend class in his military uniform, sat there silently as the professor ranted about how every member of the U.S. military is a ‘baby killer’ who enjoys violence–because what could he possibly say to a teacher who pronounced such things, with him sitting there in uniform?”
Bucknell grad Tom Elliot (profiled in a 2003 New York Times magazine article on young conservatives) experienced “quite a bit” of hostility in the classroom. “I was constantly singled out and made to look ridiculous–responsible for the right-wing ideas being lambasted by the professor that day,” he observes. Tufts’ Jordana Starr listens to her media-and-politics professor berate conservatives week after week: President Bush’s re-election is the “apocalypse,” Mr. Bush is an evil draft dodger, ad nauseam.
The leftism that so angers these students includes the hey-ho-Western-civ-has-got-to-go theories that inform college courses from coast to coast. “In too many classrooms,” says former education secretary William Bennett, “radical professors teach their students that Western thought is suspect, that Enlightenment ideals are inherently oppressive and that the basic principles of the American founding are not ‘relevant’ to our time.”
College course catalogs often read like satires. Want to study English lit at, say, Penn? Freshmen take introductory classes like “Secrecy and Sexuality in the Modern Novel,” taught by–no joke–Heather Love. In the course description, Ms. Love explains that “many of the books that we consider ‘great literature’?”–note the obligatory postmodern scare quotes–“are noted as much for what they don’t say as for what they do.” Deconstructing Herman Melville and other dead white males, Ms. Love promises to uncover “what, if anything, they are hiding” about homosexuality, pederasty and incest.
That’s for first-year students. Ms. Love’s upper-level course “Theories of Gender and Sexuality” focuses on “reproductive rights; pornography, ‘sex work’ [prostitution], and free speech; .?.?. and transgender activism,” among other themes that seem to have zilch to do with English lit. Other English majors get to explore “postcolonial literature” with Professor Cynthia Port, who relies on radical authors Edward Said and Frantz Fanon to “revise imperial narratives, challenge assumptions about identity and otherness, and scrutinize the politics of language.”
Want to learn history at Brown? “Europe from Rome to the Eighteenth Century,” taught by Prof. Amy Remensnyder, will chart “the complex divisions” of various groups within European societies “according to gender, class, and ethnicity,” the holy trinity of postmodern intellectuals. “In the end,” says Mr. Bennett, “the central problem is not that the majority of students are being indoctrinated (although some are) but that they graduate knowing almost nothing at all. Or worse still, they graduate thinking that they know everything.”
A student, conservative or otherwise, who doesn’t buy into the West-is-the-worst line can “have an awful time of it,” says Harvard junior Jordan Hylden. “It is quite difficult in fields like literature, anthropology, the social sciences and even religion to even be informed,” he complains. “It’s like an ivory echo chamber, where only the ‘right’–subversive, anti-Western–ideas get a hearing.” Small wonder that enrollments in such fields have plummeted. The percentage of undergrad degrees in the humanities, nearly 21% in the mid-1960s, fell to 12% or so by the '90s and has never climbed back up.
Some conservative students stuck in a left-wing echo chamber keep their real views to themselves and parrot the “correct” line, fearing that otherwise they’ll get a low grade. One earnest Princeton freshman had to write a paper on same-sex marriage, which he opposes, for a constitutional-law course taught by a pro-gay-marriage professor. “I radically altered my position to make it more in line with what my professor’s beliefs are on this topic and many others–and I know what those beliefs are, because she insists on starting each class with a diatribe covering any number of current political issues, in addition to mocking Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas consistently,” he says.
A 2003 survey by the Independent Women’s Forum found that anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of students had felt forced to check “their intellectual and philosophical honesty at the door in order to get good grades.” A brand-new American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey finds that half of all students–not just conservatives–at the top 50 colleges say that profs frequently inject their political views into courses, and almost one-third think that they have to agree with those views to get a good grade.
Such self-censorship may become rarer, thanks in large part to several national organizations whose efforts to bring diversity of thought to academe are starting to pay off. These groups help create right-of-center student clubs, and they sponsor conservative talks–giving students the self-assurance to express conservative views publicly and fostering campus dialogue. “There is no coercion or imposition going on,” Bucknell’s Mr. Mitchell editorialized in the Washington Times. Rather, a demand for conservative ideas “is simply being met by, you might say, intellectual entrepreneurs.”
Perhaps most significant is Students for Academic Freedom, founded in 2003 and already boasting 130 campus chapters. Its key initiative is a campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights, which enjoins universities not to deny tenure or fail to hire teachers solely because of their “retrograde” conservative politics, and to ensure that teachers keep their classes from becoming left-wing propaganda sessions. “What I’ve set out to do is to try to restore the educational principles that were in place before the generation of '60s leftists infiltrated the university and corrupted it by transforming it into an ideological platform,” explains founder David Horowitz. Legislation enacting variations of the bill is on the move in 19 states. In Colorado, state colleges adopted a version of the bill “voluntarily,” to prevent the Legislature from imposing even tougher rules.
In lobbying for the bill of rights, SAF publicizes horror stories that its chapters gather: a Spanish instructor telling his class, “I wish George Bush were dead”; a public policy prof telling a student headed for a conservative conference in Washington, “Well, then, you’ll probably fail my course”; a law professor proclaiming, “We all know that the ‘R’ in Republican stands for racist”; and a criminology teacher who asked students on a test to explain why George Bush is a war criminal, and then gave an “F” to a student who answered that Saddam Hussein, not Mr. Bush, was the monster. Mr. Horowitz says that conservative kids have usually just accepted such classroom demagoguery. “They’re conservative, and their disposition is to suffer: ‘That’s just the way colleges are,’?” Mr. Horowitz says. “What I’ve done as an ex-radical is to encourage them to see the injustices done to them as injustices–and do something about it.”
Needless to say, the university establishment is downright angry about SAF’s campaign–all the more so because it turns the left’s own language of “diversity” and “rights” against it. The liberal American Association of University Professors, in textbook Orwellian fashion, declares the Academic Bill of Rights a “grave threat” to academic freedom. In Colorado, Mr. Horowitz recounts, “A student whose professor at a state school threw him out of class, saying, ‘I don’t want your right-wing views in my classroom,’ testified at a legislative hearing that the bill would be a good idea, since it would curtail that kind of behavior. Once the student gets away from the microphone, the chairman of the philosophy department from the state university in question comes up, jams the kid in the chest with his finger, and says, ‘I have a Ph.D. from Harvard, and I will sue your f—ing ass if this bill passes.’?” A legislator, overhearing the threat from this anti-Socrates, noted: “That’s exactly why we need this bill of rights.”
The idea of intellectual diversity seems to be catching on even where the Academic Bill of Rights hasn’t yet appeared. Consider Columbia University, currently embroiled in controversy because, as the New York Sun has reported, pro-Arab professors have promoted a venomously anti-Israel classroom agenda, jeering at students who disagree. In response, the liberal Columbia Daily Spectator, the school’s major undergraduate paper, called for greater political balance on the faculty. “By not having a conservative voice hawk its wares in the hue and cry of the academic marketplace, Columbia is failing its students,” the paper argued. “It should be self-evident that a faculty that speaks with unanimity on some of the most divisive issues of the day is not fulfilling its duty.”
SAF helps college kids resist classroom demagoguery, but where can a student go for teaching that doesn’t ignore or denounce conservative ideas or traditional learning but instead explores them sympathetically? Some students look to the new conservative media–talk radio, Fox News Channel, the blogosphere. “Excluding one great economics professor, I learned more from listening to Rush Limbaugh every day than from all the NYU professors I’ve had,” says Katherine Ernst, not really joking. Several students told me that they read National Review Online and FrontPage daily as reality checks on their classes.
But if a student is really lucky, he’ll find a prof like Princeton political scientist Robert George, a rare conservative who not only survives but thrives in academe. Mr. George has sparked passionate intellectual interest among students. “Prof. George’s stamp on our intellectual formation is unmistakable,” confided one. Students particularly admire Mr. George’s approach to intellectual debate. “For our papers,” says Duncan Sahner, the intensely serious editor of the Princeton Tory, the campus’s conservative magazine, “he stresses the need to engage in what he calls the ‘strongest possible lines of counterargument.’ Straw-man parries, he says, only hurt conservatism.” Moreover, Mr. Sahner adds, “His interactions with those who disagree with him are great examples of professional courtesy.”
Mr. George has also helped students expand their intellectual horizons through his fast-growing, four-year-old James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a model of liberal education in the old-fashioned sense. It runs high-level lectures by such conservative thinkers as Justice Antonin Scalia and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield, as well as such notable liberal scholars as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Michael Sandel. The program also enables Mr. George to appoint half a dozen visiting Madison Fellows, whose ranks have included such conservative lights as political scientists Angelo Codevilla and Hadley Arkes.
“All of a sudden,” says one Princeton faculty member, “you’ve got a critical mass of conservative adults on campus, and conservative views become live options for students.” And Princeton’s right-leaning students have formed a little platoon around the Madison Program–as I discovered when, on short notice on a crisp November day, Mr. George gathered 25 or so of them to speak with me in front of a roaring fireplace.
Since few schools–and even fewer elite schools–boast such profs and programs, other national groups have rushed in to supply some of what’s missing. The Virginia-based Young America’s Foundation sponsors more than 200 university lectures a year by leading conservatives such as Mr. Horowitz, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes and antifeminist critic Christina Hoff Sommers. Every year, thousands of students attend YAF’s conferences on the principles of a free society, some held at the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., which the group bought in 1998.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded in 1953 but reinvigorated in recent years, is perhaps the biggest force fighting the left’s campus domination. It sponsors hundreds of conservative campus lectures a year, rooted in “the enduring Western intellectual patrimony” of political and economic liberty, limited government, the rule of law, moral truth and personal responsibility. ISI’s talks are usually more highbrow than YAF’s: regular speakers include classicist Victor Davis Hanson and historian Forrest McDonald.
Another key initiative from ISI: a series of short student guides, written by first-rate scholars such as John Lukacs (on history) and Gerald Bradley (on constitutional law), that show undergraduates how to educate themselves in the traditional academic disciplines. Hundreds of thousands are now in print. In addition, ISI provides a guide to colleges that, among other features, warns college applicants about the schools that are particularly PC and shows them how to find teachers committed to scholarship rather than indoctrination. Says Roger Kimball, whose pioneering “Tenured Radicals” exposed the left’s campus stranglehold 15 years ago: “ISI is an indispensable ally in the fight against spurious claims to ‘diversity,’ ‘tolerance,’ and ‘enlightenment’ in the university, while also providing a beacon that serious students and scholars can follow with genuine profit. As Voltaire said about another supremely important fixture in the universe, if ISI did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.”
One of ISI’s biggest boosts to campus conservatism has been to expand the number of right-leaning student publications. For some $1 million a year on printing costs and journalistic training, ISI now boasts 85 or so member publications at schools ranging from elite Columbia and the University of Chicago to small community colleges–a 50% jump from just a few years ago. More than 800 kids currently work on the papers.
At their best, these publications mix serious analysis of both national and campus issues with impertinent antiliberal humor. The Virginia Advocate at UVa is a good example. A recent issue featured a thoughtful interview with conservative critic Paul Cantor on popular culture, as well as the latest installment of a satirical column written by “The Stinky Hippy” (a recurring complaint of right-of-center college kids). An autumn issue of the Stanford Review mock-reported on “The Penis Dialogues: A journey of self-awakening?.?.?. and penises”–but also editorialized with sharp intelligence about “Musharraf’s Deception” in the war on terror.
The campus left has greeted these publications with outrage. In 2003, at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, to take one prominent example, the Hawk’s Right Eye–judged by the College Republican National Committee the second-best conservative student paper in the country–published a spate of anti-PC articles, until university president Roy Nirschel charged that the paper had “crossed seriously over the lines of propriety and respect,” “flirted with racist and anti-Islamic rhetoric,” and–you guessed it–created a “hostile environment for our students and community.” The school froze $2,700 in campus funds granted to the paper. It was a “death blow” for the Hawk’s Right Eye, says editor Jason Mattera, silencing it for the year.
Student leftists, sometimes with the support of school officials, regularly try to shut down or shut up conservative student publications, practicing what civil libertarian Nat Hentoff calls “free speech for me and not for thee.” A few years ago, for instance, Cornell’s dean of students stood side by side with leftist students as they torched copies of the Cornell Review, which had run an article mocking Ebonics. An official university spokesman defended the burning as “symbolic.” In 2003, Campus magazine reports, the liberal-controlled SUNY-Albany student association, solely for political reasons, nixed student activity funds for the right-leaning College Standard Magazine–this, after the magazine had already faced months of harassment from the campus left, including disruptions of its meetings by radical groups, thousands of copies stolen, and defacement of its display stands with anticonservative threats. The magazine’s staff, claiming discrimination against their conservative ideas, won a 10-month court battle against the school to have funding restored.
Of course, conservative kids face the same social pressures that all college students do. So how do they fare on the campus social scene? It varies by school. Students I interviewed who attended Southern schools said that right-of-center kids were in the majority and set the tone. Harris Martin, a University of Georgia history major who estimates that over 60% of students there tilt right, says, “The culture is a distinctly Southern conservative one–hunting, football, big trucks and SUVs, camouflage, old baseball caps, fishing, country music and Southern rock.” At Clemson in South Carolina, says poli-sci junior Andrew Davis, “the typical student is Republican,” though most don’t care much about politics.
The more politically correct culture prevailing at other schools, especially the Ivies, can be a problem for conservative students. Several Princeton freshmen believed that being seen as a conservative would make it harder for them to get into one of the school’s prestigious “bicker” eating clubs–key sources of social standing on a status-conscious campus, and the places to party. “I’ve avoided writing any major articles for the Tory, because I’m afraid it could hurt me when it reaches the time for me to bicker,” one freshman confessed. Two other students hesitated to talk with me for the same reason, while a third said that she, too, wouldn’t write for the Tory until she had made it into a selective club.
But for all the anxiety of the Princeton students, conservative kids on most campuses are eager to engage their liberal classmates (at least the ones who aren’t burning newspapers) and have sparked a genuinely two-sided conversation that so rarely occurs in the classroom. The University of Washington College Republicans, for example, hold regular debates with Young Democrats and other campus liberal groups. “I like to think that we’re talking to young people who may not have formed their views and convincing them that our views are right,” chapter head Nick Dayton recently observed. The conversation can continue in the dorms. “My roommate and I used to spend hours watching old episodes of The West Wing,” says Yalie Nikki McArthur. “She is as liberal as I am conservative, and we always had little political debates during the commercial breaks.”
Conservative students must also deal with the coed dorms and hookup sex, drink-till-you’re-blitzed parties, and general civilizational chaos of life at many schools–vividly described by author Tom Wolfe in his new novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons”–that liberal educators abetted and encouraged when they rejected any in loco parentis duties decades ago and began to celebrate the idea of college being a time of “experimentation” and “growth.” For some libertarian kids on the right, the social scene is A-OK. “Say what you will about us, we like to party!” enthuses “conservative libertarian” Ruben Duran, a University of Michigan junior. “More than our fair share of sex, alcohol, rock ‘n’ roll. Not so much drugs, though,” he adds helpfully. But for some conservative students, especially those from religious backgrounds, the bedlam can be unsettling.
Harvard’s Jordan Hylden, a conservative Protestant, finds Mr. Wolfe’s characterization of campus life “depressingly correct.” As well he might, given the dean-supervised tailgate party for the Harvard-Yale football game this November, so out-of-control with drunkenness, drugs and nudity that it made headlines in the Boston Herald. “Today’s university is without morals or guiding principles, except one,” Mr. Hylden contends: “to follow in all things the ideal of ‘to thine own self be true.’ Individual desires, whatever they are, are affirmed, and the denial of these desires, by yourself or by another person or group, is the greatest possible evil.”
Some conservative students feel considerable pressure to “grow.” Jennifer Mickel, a pretty Princeton sophomore majoring in Near Eastern studies, is a Presbyterian from Monroe, La., and a moral traditionalist. She’ll drink a bit, but random hookups are a big no. And she gets flak for it. “Many of my girlfriends describe their sexual exploits in graphic detail and tell me that I need to get over my ‘penis fear,’?” she confides. Many Princeton males, she says, expect sex, or at least “intimate preludes to it,” to follow a conversation and a dance–and certainly a bite to eat. “I just don’t understand how boys and girls alike can throw around intimate acts so lightly,” Miss Mickel laments. Things are different back in Monroe, where the rules of courtship still apply (a point several Southern students made to me about their hometowns). Lots of students, she says, do eventually get into serious, almost-married relationships at Princeton, but these often grow out of “repeated hookups.” “Perhaps, in a way, it’s like a new kind of dating,” Miss Mickel reflects wryly.
“Binge drinking and hookups are pretty pervasive in collegiate culture,” says Vanderbilt’s Anne Malinee. “Generally, students across the political spectrum, even self-confessed conservatives, participate to some extent.” Recent Indiana University grad (and now law student) Joshua Claybourn agrees: “It’s not uncommon for me to hear, even among conservatives, something like this: ‘I don’t have time for a relationship, so of course I hook up.’ And I can count on one hand, among the thousands of students I’ve met, those who refrain from drinking regularly.”
Helping students resist such pressures are a growing number of vigorous student religious groups, preaching moderation. College campuses nationwide have seen a “religious upsurge” over the last decade, the Christian Science Monitor reports. MIT is now home to 15 Christian fellowship groups–“a pretty stunning development for a university .?.?. where efficiency and rationality are embedded in the DNA of the cold granite campus,” notes the Boston Globe, making the typical liberal assumption that one can’t be both an Evangelical Christian and rational. A new UCLA survey found that three-quarters of college juniors say that religious or spiritual beliefs have helped develop their identities, and 77% say that they pray.
The upperclassman leaders of these groups can set examples for younger students, as Princeton senior Renee Gardner, leader of Crossroads Christian Fellowship, tries to do with student drinking. “There’s certainly pressure on most students involved in the typical social scene to drink to excess,” says Miss Gardner, whose conservative values proved no bar to her joining one of the top Princeton bicker clubs. “I’ve chosen–as have many Christian friends–to abstain from drinking in those contexts, not only to make it simpler for us to avoid blurring the line between acceptable and unacceptable levels of drinking, but also to make others feel more comfortable who might not want to drink.”
Conservatives still have a long, long way to go before they can proclaim the left’s control over the campus broken. The professorate remains a solidly left-wing body, more likely to assign Barbara Ehrenreich than Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault than Michael Oakeshott, and nothing, not even David Horowitz’s indefatigable activism, is going to change that soon.
Nevertheless, thanks both to enterprising students and groups like ISI and SAF, the left’s iron hold on academe is beginning to loosen. Anyone who cares about the education of our children–and the future political discourse of our country–can only cheer.
Mr. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal, in whose Winter issue this article appears, and author of “South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias,” forthcoming from Regnery in March.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
I agree with this. I heard one conservative commentator state that he wasn’t going to allow his son to go to college at a school that was so filled with liberal professors (I wish I could remember the specifics…may have been Hannity… but he hosts his own show and I rarely watch it enough to remember). Since when are we judging education for our kids by the political views of the teachers? It has almost become a lynch mob mentality where anyone who doesn’t agree with the extreme conservative right is viewed as near insane and looked upon as someone who needs to be shunned by society. I truly don’t understand why people can’t see the bigotry and closed-mindedness in that situation. Conservatives now see themselves as “above” the opinions of any others in America. It has gotten ridiculous and will get even worse until their ego hits a brick wall. It can only go so far…I hope. They have left members of their own party behind apparently in an attempt to uphold these “values”. Some say they don’t agree with everything, but rarely disagree with this type of mentality when it comes to the opinions of others.[/quote]
And you wonder why you get a liberal label pinned on your shirt?
When I was taking Freshman English at U.T. El Paso in the 80’s (yes ProfX - we had colleges back in the 80’s), my ‘professor’ required us to write a paper on how evil the U.S. policy was towards Cuba. That was fine, but the funny thing was, he gave us a list of references that we were required to use. We weren’t allowed to use anything other than communist manifsto crap. I’m not making this up. I refused to play his game, and recieved a D in the class. This ‘professor’ and I had several heated discussions over the fact that he was ramming propaganda down our throats - in a Freshman English Class. No discussion - and if you had a thought, you were docked because of it. He even offered us extra credit for attending some sort of Marxist group that met in a house that smelled a lot like incense and pot.
Now that wasn’t Harvard, or Yale but happens all the time. If I was paying for my kid’s college and he told me the story I just told - I would raise a lot of hell, maybe even pull my kid out. Why? If there is no free flow of Ideas - then it’s not education, it’s indoctrination.
You might ask the Jewish Alumni at Columbia why they are withholding support from Columbia. I hardly think that the Jewish community in NYC could be considered conservative - yet they are really steamed for the same reason the a lot of regular middle of America types are.
When 50% of America thinks the media is too liberal and attacks it when it reports “bad news” or anything against the party line, it’s time to step back. While most journalists may be liberal, the media owners mostly are not and they’re the one’s who ultimately decide most of the content [/quote]
I think this is precisely wrong. Stories tend to be generated at the editorial and reporter levels, not at ownership levels – perhaps in certain cases the publisher will advance a story, but the idea that the large corporate owner is sitting there with a red pen and editing out stories and parts of stories is absurd.
Firstly, a corporation is a fiction – it’s a collection of people in various jobs, each of whom is going to bring his individual views and ideas to the fore. Secondly, the top dogs of the corporate owners have much bigger things to worry about than whether some reporter wants to follow some conspiracy-nut storyline – things like the stock price of the parent company, which is more in their job description and will affect their compensation. Thirdly, editorial boards and editors are notoriously touchy as to editorial control – they don’t even want to accept labeled “advertorials” in a lot of cases, just in case those too stupid or busy to read closely might think that reflects the editorial view of the publication (I’m talking hard-news publications here, and by “advertorials” I’m talking about the equivalent of those stupid 4-page Hydroxycut ads in muscle mags). A newspaper or magazine requiring standards of proof and fact – especially when a story sounds wacky – is not evidence of corporate censorship.
I think most people who subscribe to conspiracy theories don’t accept how random a place the world actually is – that and they need to acquaint themselves with the basic idea of Occam’s Razor, which is that one should not substitute a large, convoluted explanation when a simple explanation is sufficient.
I’m not going to say the “F word” but the signs are all there. I actually listen to Limbaugh and Hannity a few times a week and the relentless attack on academia in particular makes me cringe.
I agree with this. I heard one conservative commentator state that he wasn’t going to allow his son to go to college at a school that was so filled with liberal professors (I wish I could remember the specifics…may have been Hannity… but he hosts his own show and I rarely watch it enough to remember). Since when are we judging education for our kids by the political views of the teachers? It has almost become a lynch mob mentality where anyone who doesn’t agree with the extreme conservative right is viewed as near insane and looked upon as someone who needs to be shunned by society. I truly don’t understand why people can’t see the bigotry and closed-mindedness in that situation. Conservatives now see themselves as “above” the opinions of any others in America. It has gotten ridiculous and will get even worse until their ego hits a brick wall. It can only go so far…I hope. They have left members of their own party behind apparently in an attempt to uphold these “values”. Some say they don’t agree with everything, but rarely disagree with this type of mentality when it comes to the opinions of others.[/quote]
It’s worse in some departments than in others. I wouldn’t worry about getting political indoctrination if my kid (if I had a kid) were studying hard sciences. Moving to the soft sciences I would start to be worried, but hopefully he would stay geared toward either economics and/or psychology and away from sociology.
However, when one gets into a lot of the humanities and whatever the hell it is that can be used to describe departments such as ethnic studies, then you have basically stepped outside the world of logic and into the world of group-think and ideology. Just look at Ward Churchill. How the hell did that guy get hired, let alone attain the position of Chairman of Ethnic Studies? It doesn’t seem his resume was vetted, nor does it seem his writing was peer reviewed, which is standard in disciplines that are actually academic, rather than merely a collection of preening pseudointellectuals twaddling among themselves.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
And you wonder why you get a liberal label pinned on your shirt?
When I was taking Freshman English at U.T. El Paso in the 80’s (yes ProfX - we had colleges back in the 80’s), my ‘professor’ required us to write a paper on how evil the U.S. policy was towards Cuba. That was fine, but the funny thing was, he gave us a list of references that we were required to use. We weren’t allowed to use anything other than communist manifsto crap. I’m not making this up. I refused to play his game, and recieved a D in the class. This ‘professor’ and I had several heated discussions over the fact that he was ramming propaganda down our throats - in a Freshman English Class. No discussion - and if you had a thought, you were docked because of it. He even offered us extra credit for attending some sort of Marxist group that met in a house that smelled a lot like incense and pot.
Now that wasn’t Harvard, or Yale but happens all the time. If I was paying for my kid’s college and he told me the story I just told - I would raise a lot of hell, maybe even pull my kid out. Why? If there is no free flow of Ideas - then it’s not education, it’s indoctrination.
You might ask the Jewish Alumni at Columbia why they are withholding support from Columbia. I hardly think that the Jewish community in NYC could be considered conservative - yet they are really steamed for the same reason the a lot of regular middle of America types are.
[/quote]
You can keep your labels. In that situation, I would have done exactly what you did and received a lower grade. I went a majority black college(at the time, they have since become part of Texas A&M University and diversified their population which is a good thing) and I had no classes that tried to control thought like that. If anything, we were encouraged to think freely and express ourselves…as long as we did it well using the writing education we had received. In those situations, perhaps your ideas of what substantiates a “good school” might need to change. I won’t even get into the “fraternity-like” aspect of some colleges that later pervade the work force and reflect on who is hired and fired. When it comes to education, I do not support the brainwashing of students to believe any particular set of values outside of what creates a useful citizen of society. This is one more reason your blatent labels do not apply to me or many of the people you throw them at.
Also, from the talk show I was listening to, Scarborough took this beyond the confines of what you are talking about and presented it as if your child’s schooling should be based on the political views of the teachers. Not all “liberal” teachers will be forcing their views on the students like I would hope is the same with “conservative” teachers. Watch your random tossing of labels.
Here’s a couple interesting post relating to diversity of thought in academia:
UCLA Faculty Diversity: Updated
I just received a 206 page book from the UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity (I had no idea we even had such a person), which provides a department by department breakdown of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. The breakdown includes not only raw data, but also an estimate of “underutilization,” which is defined as the “difference between actual number of faculty [in a particular department] of a particular group [i.e. race or gender] and the expected number of faculty based on the availability estimate [i.e., the estimated number of potential faculty hires of that race or gender in that field nationally].”
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this book, since Prop 209 presumably bars me from making use of such data in voting on hiring decisions. In any case, I note that there is no data on forms of diversity other than race and gender, such as intellectual or political diversity. No surprise there. My guess is that the highest underutilization number would be for pro-life female Republicans of all ethnicities.
I base this estimate on one of the most famous unpublished studies of the legal academy. As the Yale Daily News reported back in 1996, for example ( http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=5977 ):
[i] “The basic argument for diversity in faculty hiring is incoherent unless there is more hiring of white Republicans and Christians because they are the two groups more underrepresented than women and most minorities,” [Northwestern law professor and Volokh Conspirator James] Lindgren said.
Lindgren confined his remarks to the hiring of professors and justified his claims on the basis of a study he conducted which breaks law professors down according to political affiliations, religion, gender, and race.
Although Lindgren's study was distributed to students upon entrance into the lecture hall of Room 127 in the Sterling Law buildings, the figures are not for publication. [/i] [Update: Jim Lindgren corrects several aspects of the Yale story -- see below]
Anyway, here’s my law school’s underutilization data:
[Table graphic – follow original link to see graphic]
The number of Republicans on our faculty is roughly the same as the number of African-Americans, for whatever that’s worth, by the way. According to the University of Pennsylvania?s National Annenberg 2004 Election Survey ( http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/2004_03_party-id_11-19_pr.pdf ), 31.8% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Assuming that figure as the availability estimate, the expected number of Republican faculty should be 20.35 (I know that Republican affiliation skews lower among individuals with post-graduate degrees, but I’m having trouble finding that data). Subtracting the expected number of Republican faculty from the number of actual Republicans (5) gives us an underutilization factor of -15.35, which would be significantly higher than the factor for any ethnic group.
Update: A reader emails:
[i]I noticed one of your trackbacks was criticizing you for using general population figures instead of specific lawyer figures. I posted a comment there which I think may interest you:
" I checked the GSS. There aren't enough lawyers in any given year to get a solid estimate, but over the course of 1972-2002 there were 114 law professors, attorneys, and judges in the data. Of these, 31% were Republicans (and 41% were Democrats). These aren't ideal data since a lot has changed in 20 years (in particular, educated professionals have trended Democrat). As a partial compensation for this, I also looked at all people with graduate degrees in 2002, of whom the GSS had 230. 23% of these people were Republicans (and 42% Democrats). We can't be sure since we don't have recent data on lawyers only, but nonetheless, it's a reasonable estimate that about 20-30% of lawyers are Republicans. Even if we take the lower estimate, this still makes Republicans dramatically underrepresented on the UCLA law faculty. "[/i]
Steve Verdon chimed in on that same trackback with a post over at his blog ( http://www.steveverdon.com/archives/completeidiocy/002065.html ), in which he notes that the blogger in question’s ad hominem attack on me ( http://debfrisch.com/archives/000089.html ) (a) wrongly accuses me of making a statistical error in this post, (b) herself makes a whopper of an error, and (c) deliberately and selectively misquotes me to misrepresent my position. Steve concludes:
Even more amusing when commenters point out that she has misconstrued the point of Prof. Bainbridge’s post, has misrepresented the data, and selectively quotes Prof. Bainbridge she says she can’t see the point. Have some integrity Deb, and just admit you messed up.
This isn’t the first time the blogger in question has made gross factual errors and thereby misrepresented my position (e.g., here ProfessorBainbridge.com ). It will be the last time I take notice of her mistakes and misrepresentations, however. Life’s too short to waste time and effort trying to instruct the ineducable, especially those who seem to be deliberately obstuse.
Update: One more email from a reader to share:
[i]I realize that you are finished taking notice of Deb Frisch's "mistakes and misrepresentations" - and with good reason - but I happened to read your first post about her yesterday and after looking around her website was truly appalled by this post ( http://debfrisch.com/archives/000087.html ) that appears to now be removed from the main page and archives of her website but which I have the archived link to because I forwarded it to my girlfriend (we were both in your Business Associations class while at UCLA). I have no idea if you've seen this diatribe. [Prof B: Yep. I saw it.]
At first I thought it was simply an example of the how, while the internet has provided an invaluable resource for gathering information outside of the mainstream media, it also encourages those who are so inclined to be wildly uncivil. After doing a little poking around though, and discovering that this lady is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Arizona, I was genuinely disturbed. First, the childish nature of her insults directed at you are really striking coming from an educator. Second, she proudly belittles the idea that you would expect accuracy from her (i.e., not claiming that you had taken a position on the Summers brouhaha that you hadn't). Does the UofA really want professors to whom accuracy is to be mocked? Third, as if to prove how unconcerned she is with accuracy, she attributes to you a quote from a Charles Krauthammer column that you (admittedly approvingly) had partially reproduced on your site without acknowledging that's what she had done. Fourth, and far and away the worst, she mocks the idea of Christianity without any humor whatsoever, and proudly puts forth the idea that one cannot be a decent professor if one believes in God, Jesus or presumably any other deity.
I enjoy reading your blog, but I am not religious and am a political moderate. However, I don't see how anyone could fail to be worried about the fact that this woman is influencing students at a large university (in the Pac-10 no less!). [/i]
Unfortunately, being shrill, careless, and intellectually dishonest appears to be no barrier to academic success. Equally unfortunately, they’re also qualities that will appeal to a certain segment of the blogosphere. In any case, what we have here is what Jonah Goldberg referred to the other day ( http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200502081153.asp ) as “one of those fun Internet fights between two people who do not like or respect each other.” As I noted above, however, life’s too short to waste on such people.
Update: Deborah Frisch continues stalking my site, sending trackbacks to multiple posts to link to ad hominem attacks. While I appreciate the boost to my TTLB Ecosystem link score, I’m not giving the [rhymes with witch] access to my site. Hence, she is the first and only person whose trackbacks I am routinely deleting from my site. (After her offensive emails, I’ve also added her to my email filter blocks.)
Professor Bainbridge has an interesting discussion of faculty diversity at UCLA. He cites to a Yale Daily News article covering a talk I gave at Yale in 1996. I well remember the talk, since it was the first time I presented at Yale and the first time I talked publicly about my work on viewpoint diversity. Faculty and student turnout was high, and I later saw a lot of ripples emanating from my then-shocking attempt to quantify who really were the most underrepresented and overrepresented groups in law teaching.
The Yale Daily News story was inaccurate in several details. It is obvious that the reporter was not taping and was inexperienced at taking notes. I considered writing a letter to the editor at the time, but thought that being misquoted in a student newspaper probably didn’t merit correction, especially since the misquotations were not that serious. I later learned in the Bellesiles affair that newspaspers and magazines often don’t run corrections anyway.
One of the nice things about having a blog is that I can comment and correct them when they come up. [If there were such things then, I could have used it to good effect.]
The headline says “Alum Challenges Affirmative Action . . .,” which I didn’t. The article itself correctly characterizes the talk as “pro-affirmative action.” I did challenge the narrowness of the search for diversity, since political and intellectual diversity is extremely important to viewpoint diversity. I strongly favor affirmative action, and ALWAYS have. At Yale in 1996, I explicitly said that I favored affirmative action for groups that were “still strongly underrepresented” and historically were “traditionally locked out” of the academy, such as Hispanics, women, and African Americans.
The Yale Daily News incorrectly quotes me as saying: “The basic argument for diversity in faculty hiring is incoherent unless there is more hiring of white Republicans and Christians because they are the two groups more underrepresented than women and most minorities.” The reporter also incorrectly summarizes my argument with these words: “According to Lindgren, Protestants and Republicans are the most underrepresented among American law professors and Democrats and Jews are the most overrepresented compared to the U.S. population.”
I am certain that I didn’t quite say either of these things because they are not what my data at the time showed (or now show). Women were represented in law teaching at about the same as proportion of parity with their % in the general population as Christians, so women would have been MORE underrepresented than white Christians. Republicans, on the other hand, were about as underrepresented as Hispanics and more underrepresented than women and Christians, who were in turn more underrepresented than African Americans. So the statements attributed to me are more or less correct about Republicans (and white Republicans), but not about Christians, but even there I was talking about diversity of viewpoint, not other kinds of diversity. Perhaps the reporter was confused by my claims that subgroups such as white female Protestants and white female Republicans were incredibly underrepresented.
Further, I had passed out some of the data tables from my talk (the article incorrectly says that my study itself was passed out). With my tables in front of the audience, I was constantly pointing to data that I was discussing. I couldn’t have said what the Yalie Daily attributed to me because I would have been challenged on it using my own data.
I talked about the representation of so many different groups and subgroups that I think that things just ran together in the reporter’s mind.
The Yalie Daily quotes then-dean Tony Kronman with some reasonable reservations about my argument, which I don’t doubt that he expressed. But Kronman, whom I had never previously met, was so enthusiastic after my talk that he offered to host a conference on ancient law at Yale if I would organize it (in the mid-1990s I had co-organized one at Berkeley). I never took Kronman up on his extremely generous offer (I got too busy with faculty appointments at Northwestern and my Ph.D. at Chicago).
[quote]Professor X wrote:
You can keep your labels. In that situation, I would have done exactly what you did and received a lower grade. I went a majority black college(at the time, they have since become part of Texas A&M University and diversified their population which is a good thing) and I had no classes that tried to control thought like that. If anything, we were encouraged to think freely and express ourselves…as long as we did it well using the writing education we had received. In those situations, perhaps your ideas of what substantiates a “good school” might need to change. I won’t even get into the “fraternity-like” aspect of some colleges that later pervade the work force and reflect on who is hired and fired. When it comes to education, I do not support the brainwashing of students to believe any particular set of values outside of what creates a useful citizen of society. This is one more reason your blatent labels do not apply to me or many of the people you throw them at.
Also, from the talk show I was listening to, Scarborough took this beyond the confines of what you are talking about and presented it as if your child’s schooling should be based on the political views of the teachers. Not all “liberal” teachers will be forcing their views on the students like I would hope is the same with “conservative” teachers. Watch your random tossing of labels.[/quote]
Texas A&I? Man they used to have some wicked football teams - sent a bunch of folks to the Pros.
Anyhow. I think there is a huge bias in academia towards allowing the liberal agenda to be spread in colleges without any concern if the agenda being forced is even relevant to the subject being studied.
Would a militant anti-abortionist be allowed the same free reign as, say, a Churchhill? I really don’t think so. That just doesn’t jive with the liberal agenda.
The label tossing wasn’t random - you appeared to be quacking like a duck again.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Here’s a couple interesting post relating to diversity of thought in academia: [/quote]
No offense, but it is often hard to determine where your use of references end and your own personal beliefs begin. I appreciate the info, but it leaves you out of harm’s way in a debate. A little too neutral if you ask me. Why do you do that?
Also, to Rainjack, I don’t quack. If you are lost as to my personal stance on an issue, all you have to do is ask. That is why labeling or attempting to box me into a specific set of values is a waste of time. I doubt you know me that well yet.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
Here’s a couple interesting post relating to diversity of thought in academia:
No offense, but it is often hard to determine where your use of references end and your own personal beliefs begin. I appreciate the info, but it leaves you out of harm’s way in a debate. A little too neutral if you ask me. Why do you do that?
Also, to Rainjack, I don’t quack. If you are lost as to my personal stance on an issue, all you have to do is ask. That is why labeling or attempting to box me into a specific set of values is a waste of time. I doubt you know me that well yet.[/quote]
I thought my opinion was pretty clear from my previous post, the one prior to the reference posts.
These were just references concerning the representation of registered Republicans at UCLA and in academia overall. “Registered Republican” is correlated to conservative, but you really don’t get a good flavor for data like this unless it is broken down by department – and it is also relevant on a per department basis, as conservatism really won’t flavor the type of physics instruction one receives, while it would definitely impact a history lesson.
The most amazing thing is how little most people know or understand about the modern middle east. You think that its inherent hate that is making these passionate people fight against the american cause. Republicans love to confuse the facts. American troops have killed approximately 25,000 Iraqi citizens “The independent London”. The source so im not accused of lying. Do you remember how you felt after 9/11? Do you remember the anger and the hatred you had? The need for revenge? That was only a few thousand people. Put yourself in the shoes of the Iraqi people, of the RADICALS, and understand why they are fighting against americans. How can we possibly be so ignorant that we completely forget that we are fighting in this war because of 9/11 because of revenge, because of a belief in our country. They have a belief in their religion, in their way of doing things. President Bush has done everything he could possibly do to make a passionate group of people more passionate. He has done everything he could possibly do to make the world less safe. I fear for myself being of draft age. We are fighting against the largest religion in the world, not iraq, not iran. WHile I dont entirely agree with the original post. Have a mind of your own.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
and it is also relevant on a per department basis, as conservatism really won’t flavor the type of physics instruction one receives, while it would definitely impact a history lesson.
[/quote]
One could argue, however, that history itself is the hands of the teller. We can teach facts, Like Kennedy was assissinated, but any deeper look into possible conspiracy theories that surround the topic could be perceived as biased. That doesn’t mean they should be excluded from a lesson. It only means that the goal should be for there to either be a representation of both sides, or an understanding by the student, the teacher and the parents that this view doesn’t mean that the child should think exactly the same. As long as freedom of thought is allowed, there shouldn’t be the perception that there should be an abscence of an individual’s point of view if they are teaching a lesson. I think it is easy to cross the line and fall right into censorship. This should be avoided.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
and it is also relevant on a per department basis, as conservatism really won’t flavor the type of physics instruction one receives, while it would definitely impact a history lesson.
One could argue, however, that history itself is the hands of the teller. We can teach facts, Like Kennedy was assissinated, but any deeper look into possible conspiracy theories that surround the topic could be perceived as biased. That doesn’t mean they should be excluded from a lesson. It only means that the goal should be for there to either be a representation of both sides, or an understanding by the student, the teacher and the parents that this view doesn’t mean that the child should think exactly the same. As long as freedom of thought is allowed, there shouldn’t be the perception that there should be an abscence of an individual’s point of view if they are teaching a lesson. I think it is easy to cross the line and fall right into censorship. This should be avoided.
[/quote]
Actually, that’s precisely my point, and that’s why it’s problematic that departments such as history and the humanities don’t have intellectual diversity. Students, in order to learn to think critically, need to be exposed to a variety of viewpoints and be encouraged to challenge them – right now they are generally not being exposed to diverse viewpoints.
In the humanities and social sciences, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one.
For nonacademic practitioners, the numbers are not nearly so skewed. Either there is bias against Republicans, or Republicans prefer other options over academia more than Democrats do. I am more inclined to the latter option, but this requires investigation.
Among anthropologists, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is about thirty to one. For economists it is “only” three to one.
Stanford and Berkeley have especially high ratios of Democrats to Republicans, about nine to one; this is taken from voter registration records, rather than the questionnaires.
Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: November 18, 2004
BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60’s. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus.
Conservatism is becoming more visible at the University of California here, where students put out a feisty magazine called The California Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the largest groups on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors seem to be moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign contributions and two studies being published on Nov. 18.
One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.
In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans.
The political imbalance on faculties has inspired a campaign to have state legislatures and Congress approve an “academic bill of rights” protecting students and faculty members from discrimination for their political beliefs. The campaign is being led by Students for Academic Freedom, a group with chapters at Berkeley and more than 135 other campuses. It was founded last year by the leftist-turned-conservative David Horowitz, who helped start the 1960’s antiwar movement while a graduate student at Berkeley.
“Our goal is not to have the government dictate who’s hired but to take politics out of the hiring process and the classroom,” said Mr. Horowitz, who called the new studies the most compelling evidence yet of hiring bias. “Right now, conservative students are discouraged from pursuing scholarly careers, because they see very clearly that their professors consider Republicans to be the enemy.”
Academic leaders have resisted his group’s legislative proposal, saying that discrimination is rare and already forbidden, and they dispute the accusations of faculty bias. Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of Berkeley, said that he was not sure if the new study of his faculty accurately reflected the professors’ political leanings, and that these leanings were irrelevant anyway.
“The essence of a great university is developing and sharing new knowledge as well as questioning old dogma,” Dr. Birgeneau said. “We do this in an environment which prizes academic freedom and freedom of expression. These principles are respected by all of our faculty at U.C. Berkeley, no matter what their personal politics are.”
Professors at Berkeley and other universities provided unprecedented financial support for the Democratic Party this election. For the first time, universities were at the top of the list of organizations ranked by their employees’ contributions to a presidential candidate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group.
In first and second place, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, were the University of California system and Harvard, whose employees contributed $602,000 and $340,000, respectively, to Senator John Kerry. At both universities, employees gave about $19 to the Kerry campaign for every dollar for the Bush campaign.
One theory for the scarcity of Republican professors is that conservatives are simply not that interested in academic careers. A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches linguistics and is the author of “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think,” said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views. “Unlike conservatives,” he said, “they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about.”
Some non-Democrats prefer to attribute the imbalance to the structure of academia, which allows hiring decisions and research agendas to be determined by small, independent groups of scholars. These fiefs, the critics say, suffer from a problem described in The Federalist Papers: an autonomous “small republic” is prone to be dominated by a cohesive faction that uses majority voting to “outnumber and oppress the rest,” in Madison’s words.
“Our colleges have become less marketplaces of ideas than churches in which you have to be a true believer to get a seat in the pews,” said Stephen H. Balch, a Republican and the president of the National Association of Scholars. “We’ve drifted to a secular version of 19th-century denominational colleges, in which the university’s mission is to crusade against sin and make the country a morally better place.”
Dr. Balch’s organization of what he calls traditional scholars is publishing the two new faculty studies in its journal, Academic Questions (online at www.nas.org). In one study, Professor Klein and Charlotta Stern, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research in Sweden, asked the members of scholars’ professional associations which party’s candidates they had mostly voted for over the previous decade.
The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged from 3 to 1 among economists to 30 to 1 among anthropologists. The researchers found a much higher share of Republicans among the nonacademic members of the scholars’ associations, which Professor Klein said belied the notion that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly careers.
“Screened out, expelled or self-sorted, they tend to land outside of academia because the crucial decisions - awarding tenure and promotions, choosing which papers get published - are made by colleagues hostile to their political views,” said Professor Klein, who classifies himself as a libertarian.
Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley who was chairman of the faculty senate and director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, said that professors tried not to discriminate in hiring based on politics, but that their perspective could be warped because so many colleagues shared their ideology.
“Their view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe,” said Dr. Trow, who calls himself a conservative. “Debate is stifled, and conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor judgment.”
The students’ magazine, The California Patriot, has frequently criticized Berkeley for the paucity of conservative views and for cases of what it has called discrimination against conservative students.
“I’m glad to get the liberal perspective, but it would be nice to get the other side, too,” said Kelly Coyne, the editor of the magazine and a senior majoring in political science. “I’m really having a hard time finding courses my last year. I don’t want to spend another semester listening to lectures about victims of American oppression.”
You’ve misinterpreted my last post as one designed to support any particular view… as did Boston perhaps.
Guys, is it not even possible for you to entertain ideas without having to equate them to a position and a political landscape?
I think the issue of internal US rules with respect to use of force are quite interesting and important. I wasn’t trying to say that the war was wrong or that Bush lied or any of the other crap you read into it from that point.
Those on the right would do well to think about what is or is not justification for external use of force. Historically, preemption hasn’t been supported – but with the advent of terrorism on US soil there has been a huge shift in this area.
I’m not arguing against it, I’m just mentioning it! Obviously, there are some on the left that think differently than yourself about this particular issue. The fact that honest people disagree in their interpretation of this issue doesn’t make everyone who disagrees with you wrong or an idiot.
Isn’t the whole point of a democracy to allow those with differing attitudes, views and thoughts to voice those opinions and through elections to influence policy? To claim all the liberals are pussies is equivalent to claiming the right are money hungry planet raping opportunists. Neither is correct.
What I was trying to do, which you misinterpreted as grayness, was point out the areas where the differences in thinking lie. I wasn’t trying to pick a side or promote a side! Your notion that I was doing so is probably why you thought I engaging in grayness. Slow down man, I’m trying to elucide the thinking points of both left and right and show where the differences stem from.
The idea is to allow the left to understand the right and the right to understand the left (or at least to allow me to understand both lines of thought at a deeper level). The reasons for disagreement come down to things which are much more interesting than party lines and rehashing the same old bullshit repeatedly.
To actually express an opinion, I think the US “panicked”. Not being used to considering yourselves anything but mighty and invulnerable, as a country, you knee-jerked and are over-responding in a big way. How long it will take to scale that back, I don’t know.
Am I correct? Who cares. It’s certainly not a left vs right issue that requires anyone to label me a moron or a pussy for thinking it.
Anyhow, I guess nobody is actually interested in understanding the issues raised by the other “side”, they are more interested in bludgeoning everyone with their own point of view (which obviously is the only correct one) in a futilte attempt to convince everyone of how correct they are.
Silly me, I thought perhaps the point of discussing these things was to gain a deeper understanding of the thinking of others – to develop your capacity to understand more aspects of the situation. Attaching critical labels to “those groups” that think different and lumping everyone into the “pussy” crowd isn’t going to work in that regard.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
Also, to Rainjack, I don’t quack. If you are lost as to my personal stance on an issue, all you have to do is ask. That is why labeling or attempting to box me into a specific set of values is a waste of time. I doubt you know me that well yet.[/quote]
I thought by agreeing with what JTF said, you made your personal stance quite obvious. If you look at the totality of your posts, one would be hard pressed to find a conservative thought, or agreement with a conservative principle.
Yet you duck and cover anytime the ‘L’ word is mentioned. Just an observation.