Maybe not as much as you would think. Says James Joyner:
This finding comports with my own experience, both as a student and as a professor. Even attending a state school in the Deep South, my political science and history professors were predominantly (but not exclusively) liberal. But debating them tended to reinforce my conservative leanings. Years later, teaching political science courses to predominantly conservative students, I oftentimes found myself taking a Devil’s Advocate stance simply to force them to challenge their own preconceptions. (Which, on reflection, made me wonder if my own profs hadn’t done the same thing.)Another thing to keep in mind is that politics simply is a non-factor in most college courses. Even now, when I imagine campus politics, like that in the country as a whole, is more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam era, there’s likely not much political talk in the math, science, engineering, and foreign languages courses.
One thing to think about is that the clear biases of my English professors brewed a certain cynicism in many students. It was so obviously easy to manipulate our professors by turning in sub-standard papers that catered to their political concerns that it was hard to see those beliefs as the product of rigorous analytical thinking.
It was so obviously easy to manipulate our professors by turning in sub-standard papers that catered to their political concerns that it was hard to see those beliefs as the product of rigorous analytical thinking.
You know, that sort of off-hand "recollection" is impossible to refute, but there have been plenty of evidence to demonstrate what you're playing at, and they've been almost entirely unsuccessful. Horowitz has been on a crusade for decades to find examples of lefty professors being biased towards liberal students and against conservatives. And what he's achieved has been absolutely embarrassing; he never finds anything! He was challenged on that point at a conference, in which he was giving a talk about liberal bias in academe, and he literally said "Why do I have to find the bias?" He was laughed out of the room.
Since we're engaging in anecdotal evidence, let me tell you, professors that I've had at every level (and it's several dozen) have delighted in shredding bad papers they are ideologically predisposed to like. You have a habit of wading outside of your expertise, and you really, really don't understand the academy. If anything, biases are based on subject matter ideology, pomos versus neo-Classicists and queer theorists, etc. But even then professors are quite ready to set aside ideology to grad papers. In fact, most professors I know are so sensitive to the idea that they would unfairly grade a paper they disagree with that they look harder for things done well in such papers.
The classic complaint against liberal professors, that they go on long harangues about politics in class, is just unsubstantiated, even though there are tons of people looking. And that's because most professors, liberal and conservative, take their jobs seriously, and possess the kind of intellectual arrogance that prevents them from acting on bias. Perhaps you'd know that, if you'd care to deal in actual human beings and not crude stereotypes designed to thrill your yes-men here in the comments.
But hey, why not engage in mindless stereotyping when you know your comment drones are going to lap it up?
Well, Freddie, your mileage may vary, but let me suggest that my expertise at being an undergraduate English major probably--forgive me if I err on your academic history--probably exceeds yours.
It was well known in many of my classes that the easiest way to get an A was to cater to whatever political project the professors were obsessed with: "Sexism in the Canterbury tales" "Race in Shakespeare" "Class in Jonathan Swift" "Homosexuality in Whitman", etc. This was not true of all of my professors, but it was true of enough of them that it bred contempt for their ideas. I worked my way through most of the pre-enlightenment English canon on the not particularly original observation that women are marginalized and maligned in most of Western literature. Average grade: 4.0
I'm not making some Horowitz claim here; I don't feel that my life was blighted by liberal bias. Rather, I feel that the obsessive focus of English departments of the time on left-wing political projects reduced the amount of useful knowledge that the students absorbed; we spent far too much time repeating the same observations about images of women/race/homosexuals/poverty/etc in pre-20th century literature. On the other hand, the obsessive focus of college students on beer pong and casual sex reduced it much more. And for all I know, English departments are now models of broad and apolitical scholarship; it's no longer my field.
I had a conservative European History professor with whom I'd often argue in class. Far from disliking me, I think he appreciated that someone was genuinely paying attention.
"It was so obviously easy to manipulate our professors by turning in sub-standard papers that catered to their political concerns that it was hard to see those beliefs as the product of rigorous analytical thinking."
I wonder if this shows your own bias to the political concern, rather than the professors. I find when I write from a point of view I don't personally agree with that I write a better paper. More than likely because I spend more time researching and better back-up the arguments with research instead of my personal views.
I didn't disagree with what I was saying (I wasn't libertarian then, and also, I've always believed things like sexism and homophobia exist.) It's just that the observations I was making were trivial, especially after I'd written them for the same professor four or five times.
This post is very funny. Last year I had a history professor who was admittedly conservative. He wasn't a Bush conservative. He could see how much of a f--k up Dubya has been. Basically, he wasn't a mindless zombie that much of the Republican party and become these days. And the only reason I knew he was a conservative was because I talked to him after class.
Me fool English professors? That's unpossible!
Honestly, Megan, my experience in the academy (admittedly limited to my years as an undergrad), especially within the history and poli sci departments where biases and distinct points of view existed to be sure were more akin to Freddie's recollections, than yours.
However, my experience in some English classes were exactly like you describe. But I think that has more to do with the inherent restrictions in the structure of an undergraduate English class that takes a singular thematic approach to all literature, regardless of the other approaches one might take to any particular book.
Yes, it limited my the depth of my understanding of any particular book, without expanding my knowledge of the theme as a whole, be it "home" or "Family" in whatever period we were reading.
But maybe I just didn't have the benefit of a fancy-pants small liberal arts college education. I went to a large state school, after all.
I don't really think there is a "liberal bias" in university education but even if there were, does it really matter? Most if not all students already have fairly well defined political preconceptions by the time they get to campus, and as we all know, one thing you can never change no matter how much you debate with someone is their politics. Speaking of that, it feels to me that the preconceptions of an ever increasing number of students these days seem to be fairly conservative on average. Even most of the so-called liberals are just those of the faux DLC third way democrat-in-name-only sort.
What even passes for liberal these days among the general population? Go back fifty or a hundred years and you had some honest to god communists in the academy. Probably don't see that much anymore.
As a graduating Romance Languages major I can say that there is quite a lot of bias in foreign language courses. In a class I took on Agriculture and Social movements in Latin America (in Spanish), the professor was still a believer in the dependence theory and it showed in the readings she selected for us. In a Spanish-language literature course I took two years ago, most of the class material was selected from the twentieth century literary boom of Latin America. The professor's passion not just for the literary greatness but for the unapologetically Marxist, collectivist ideas of authors like Neruda, García Márquez, Sepúlveda and the like was evidently manifest in class.
This isn't to say that those classes or their teachers weren't great or rewarding, but without bias they certainly were not.
"one thing you can never change no matter how much you debate with someone is their politics"
I gotta disagree with this. I entered college a purebred rural Republican who didn't think Nixon was all that bad a guy. A poli. sci. major friend of mine, a recovered Republican himself, spent a lot of time talking to me and entertaining my most vigorous arguments. Soon enough I dropped my own thoughtless conservatism and embraced more progressive views. Of course, he was helped by the fact that the ridiculous pronouncements of Reagan, then president, completely infuriated me. (Interestingly, the current administration has brought me back to the point of thinking Nixon wasn't all that bad a guy.)
Megan -
Did politics or political bias come up much in your MBA classes? Business professors have more of a tendency to be conservative than other faculty - that doesn't mean that they're majority conservative, just that there's a larger minority. In particular, there aren't nearly as many anti-business types (although I wouldn't say that there are none).
I'd be interested in hearing how your business student experience compared to your English-major experience.
I would suggest that to the extent bias does exist, it would be in what gets left OFF the reading list.
For example, in a liberal economics course, a number of marginal liberal thinkers would make the grade to be required reading. Conservatives would be limited to titans, like Milton Friedman, and only because Friedman cannot be ignored.
And don't get me started on Noam Chomsky...if he shows up on a syllabus outside of linguistics, you know the professor's a hack. (Chomsky is, in fairness, a linguistics titan.)
As an undergrad English major like Megan, I recall getting pretty sick of the Marxist/Feminist critics getting pushed on me all over the place. And this was at a fairly conservative school (Univ. of Southern Cal).
My focus: Literature of the Confederacy is underrepresented in the canon.
No, I didn't get a 4.0. :)
A politically biased professorate is problematic whether or not it indoctrinates students in a particular way, and not just for Megan's reasons. It is prone to give less objective scrutiny to ideas it finds congenial; by contrast, it is dismissive of ideas it finds objectionable, and does not rigorously analyze them.
Why is it that race and national origin are presumed to be appropriate bases for admitting students and hiring professors, but actual intellectual diversity -- that is, diversity that is most directly relevant to the missions of higher education -- is rejected as beyond the pale?
I'm not talking about all-ideas-are-equal nonsense like creationism; I just mean that a great many ideas held by conservatives (even social conservatives, to whom I am allergic) merit a better reception than they are now given in most colleges and universities.
As an science student, I didn't encounter many problems in my classes (science or humanities). In discussion-based classes the professor sometimes espoused a viewpoint, but they encouraged discussion and debate. The most notable exception was in a course that covered evolution (I don't want to hijack the thread with this!). One teacher began with something like 'The best explanation that can be scientifically examined....' while the other began 'As any right-thinking person would realize'. While they subsequently covered the same idea, obviously the tone of the two was very different.
As a postdoc, however, I found that it wasn't uncommon for seminars (attended by grad students, faculty, and undergrads)to have snide political comments or, at one memorable seminar that fell on Good Friday, comments mocking Christians. Although I wasn't warped by the experience, it definitely influenced my perceptions of the 'tolerant' folks at the second place and, depending on the virulence of the statements, could make it less (or more, depending on your perspective) enjoyable to work there.
Shelby,
Because intellectual diversity gets in the way of synchronization.
It probably matters at the margins, which is where everything matters.
This story reminds me of my own time in college -- specifically, the time spent studying Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. At the time, a professor I had summed up Kuhn's argument as having three stages:
1) "That's not true."
2) "That's true, but unimportant."
3) "That's true, it's important, and everyone always knew it."
Welcome to Paradigm Shift, Stage 2.
My undergraduate minor was in economics. I can think of one econ class that had some transparently awful liberal bias. Everything else was either neutral or slightly conservative. Even the environmental economics professor was more interested in property rights and present value than moral judgements.
I haven't taught a "Science and Society" sort of class yet, but I'm writing the syllabus and outline for a proposed course in that genre, and I've got some writers on there whom I disagree with. I've got some stuff that I like. I've got some stuff that I think is weak (including weak arguments for stances that I'd take) because I think it's important to contrast good and bad examples. And I'd be happy to mark "A" on a paper advocating an approach that I disagree with if it's well argued.
I've marked "A" on lab reports with conclusions that I thought were wrong because, based on the limited data in front of the student, the conclusions made sense, and the student actually did some extra analysis and still found support for the same conclusion.
Megan's professors may very well have been as transparently political as she says. All I can say is that there are tons of anecdotes, including this one macroeconomics course that I took, but for some reason the David Horowitzes of the world never manage to dredge up anything too significant, and those are the guys with the biggest incentive to do so. And half the time the Horowitz horror stories turn out to have a backstory.
Confession: On two occasions this quarter I said something in class that might be offensive to religious people, and in both cases I apologized.
Case 1: I'm breaking the tedium by telling a story about Isaac Newton, ointing to the variety of things he did. Then I mentioned that the work he was proudest of was his essay on the Book of Revelation. I said that it just shows that even the best scientists can get a bit nutty. Then I realized some religious students might be offended, so I said "To be clear, I have nothing against religion, I'm actually religious myself, but Newton thought he'd figured out the details of the end of the world, and that's generally a dubious path to go down."
Case 2: An experiment didn't work as expected, and wasn't supporting the point that I wanted to make. I said to the students "Well, I would like to make this point, which is consistent with other experiments, but I don't feel that I should just ignore the experimental data in front of me. If I do that, I might as well be a creationist. So we need to understand this experiment better..."
Let me reiterate that I am not making any Horowitz-esque claims. To the extent that I think liberal bias in academia might be a problem, I don't think it is a problem in the way that Horowitz does--i.e. some vast left-wing conspiracy. I also think the idea of affirmative action for conservatives or academic bills of rights is fundamentally anti-conservative; if you don't like it, send your kids somewhere else. Hi market!
I'm only saying that to the extent that overwhelming ideological bias exists--and I certainly had many fine professors, whose politics I could infer only statistically--it doesn't necessarily convert the students to its cause; it could as easily become (as it was for me and some of my classmates) a joke. And we weren't anything that could remotely be described as Republicans.
I'm currently taking a course on "Writing and Rhetorical Conventions" as part of a post-grad program. Not only is the course a lot like the pattern Megan described, there is actually nothing else to the course; it has nothing to do with writing ability (one of my feedback sheets said "So you write well," as part of an attempt to dismiss my argument), we're graded entirely on our ability to regurgitate the various -isms. I mean, a large part of our writing is supposed to be predicated on taking Louis Althusser seriously. Our textbook uses ACORN press releases as its examples and operates from the assumption that our motivations are those of Progressives. Horowitz himself couldn't invent a better example. So consider me anecdotally convinced.
The funny thing is, I went through my entire undergrad at Reed, a veritable bastion of liberalism, without ever seeing anything remotely this ham-fistedly leftist.
I had a somewhat similar experience to Megan in a few of my classes.
I was and econ student and took sciences and math as most of my electives these classes were pretty free of bias, except maybe the econ which was right of center.
However, I had a sociology and several english classes that were clearly biased. The sociology teacher was an out and out communist and conspiracy theorist. Like Megan I learned to tell them what they wanted to hear take my A or B and move on. Maybe it was just laziness on my part but the amount of work needed to get a good grade by going against their opinions was much more than the amount of work needed to get a good grade going with their opinions.
What I would like to know is how many people actually deviated from the professor's opinion and got a bad grade?
I am not going to defend somebody who will accept agreeable crap and give it an A--that path of least resistance should not be available. However, do consider this: If the processor only presents certain information in class, then you've already got that information, and you can work from it, and so it will naturally be easier to put together a paper from that perspective. The problem may not be so much about low standards as it is that you were only prepped for one side of it, so that's what you could write about easily.
Anybody who wants to write from a different perspective will be at a disadvantage, even if the professor is in fact fair-minded, because that person will have to do a lot more of his or her own research rather than drawing on what was presented in class.
I'm not defending people who offer a slanted class, just trying to diagnose whether the problem is that they apply different standards to different papers, or whether the problem is that they've only prepped students to write one type of paper, so that's the easiest paper to write.
I'm curious; there's an obvious right-ring bias in a lot of econ departments; ditto the business wing.
So if bias is so important, how come it's only reputed 'left-wing' bias that is being mentioned?
To leave out the right-wing variety smacks of a dishonest representation of the true state of affairs.
I don't know; I, and all the other English majors I ever talked to, took the path of least resistance. But I think it's as big a problem if garbage passes as if good work is penalized.
SoV: because study after study show a dramatic leftward skew in the academy; AFAIK even econ departments and business schools displaying a slight Democratic tilt.
As far as you know? You've got to be kidding me. Regardless, I have personally experienced, and know of a lot of people who have experienced said right-wing bias (btw, that's switching the goalposts 'Democractic'!='liberal')
So, are you saying that right-wing bias doesn't exist, despite many, many people who say otherwise?
Then you're really not bemoaning bias, are you? You're trying to slam so-called 'liberal' bias.
That's fine. What's not fine is not being up-front about it, as we used to say back in the late 60's/early 70's.
I don't understand. Why would you regurgitate pablum to the professor just to get a good grade? Are you paying $1000 per credit hour to be rubber stamped? Argue. Get the damn bad grade and keep your pride. Dropping one letter grade in one course isn't going to put you on welfare for the rest of your life.
You're also likely to learn something. I'm not saying the professor will show you the light, rather you will gain understanding of the thought process, rancid or virtuous as it may be, that underlies their opinions.
Shelby said:
The problem is that the moment you institute some sort of "intellectual diversity" factor into university faculty hiring, you are going to have creationist groups demanding representation in biology departments.According to studies quoted by Bryan Capaln, you typical econ and business professor is a moderate democrat. More econ professors are democrats than republicans. My econ dept however was pretty libertarian/right.
To answer thoreau's question. For me it was most often just regurgitating what was presented. It is not to hard to figure out what a prof wants to hear.
"I don't understand. Why would you regurgitate pablum to the professor just to get a good grade? Are you paying $1000 per credit hour to be rubber stamped? Argue. Get the damn bad grade and keep your pride. Dropping one letter grade in one course isn't going to put you on welfare for the rest of your life."
Because I was being forced to take the classes to begin with. I didn't want to take sociology, but it checked off a box and I didn't know it was going to be so bad before I signed up. I could have fought it, but i much more prefered spending my energy on classes and activities that interested me than fighting an ideologue.
Jason,
In actual fairness, a fatally flawed titan. The fact that anyone took him seriously as some kind of spokesman for the field, rather than just a peddler of an interesting theory about a very limited part of the field, really set linguistics back. (Hmm, reading over that last part, maybe the fault is with "everyone else", not Chomsky himself.)
And don't get me started on Noam Chomsky...if he shows up on a syllabus outside of linguistics, you know the professor's a hack. (Chomsky is, in fairness, a linguistics titan.)
Jason, just as an aside, you get a lot of Chomsky, appropriately, in Computer Science. I won't bother going into it here, but google "Chomsky Hierarchy".
What I would like to know is how many people actually deviated from the professor's opinion and got a bad grade?
Well, I know one at least. Me. I retook a particular science fiction class three tiems before I passed it, all because I couldn't bring myself to parrot particular political opinions, eg, that Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" wasn't an indictment of capitalism.
And yes, I am a little stubborn.
I'm curious; there's an obvious right-ring bias in a lot of econ departments; ditto the business wing.
SoV, surveys suggest that most economics departments are dominated by moderate Democrats (as was noted above.) Given that, are you making a statement about econ departments, or about yourself?
----
More generally, now, I think Megan is not-quite-making an important point: if the bias is so pronounced that the system can be gamed, it's not serving as good an educational purpose as it might. Which is a gentle way of saying "it's a waste of time and money, but the way college is structured there is no market driver to eliminate the waste."
ScentOfViolets, have you found an econ department where more than 25% of the faculty are anti-abortion, pro-RKBA, and anti-AA? Or might something else be going on? In economics claims of "right-wing bias" can come from people pissed off about poor grades for affirming perpetual motion or denying magnetism. Dan Klein's surveys offer some evidence that accusations of "right-wing bias" (or "libertarian bias") against the field of economists are pretty questionable. Klein's own economics department might be accused of it, and individual economics of course can be accused of it. But if you want to accuse the field of being broadly right wing, you should probably define your terms and give your evidence: if you think it's self-evident, that may tell us more about you than about the field.
I only have a year of teaching down, but let me say that there may be a real problem with your recollections. Perhaps it's a bad assumption, but I'm guessing a lot of your friends were smart, right? So the papers that seemed sub-standard to you guys were still probably the good papers in the class (it's really hard for someone who knows what they are doing to write a truly bad college paper--there's an art to being that dumb). Combine that with grade inflation, and you've got a recipe for turning in papers that you think are bullshit and your teachers think are bullshit, but that still get As.
I found myself writing "good idea" and so on next to the most trivial points when grading papers.
Thoreau, you write "there are tons of anecdotes, including this one macroeconomics course that I took, but for some reason the David Horowitzes of the world never manage to dredge up anything too significant, and those are the guys with the biggest incentive to do so."
What could they, as a practical matter, dredge up? For sex bias, people came up with perfectly-clear gotcha experiments, e.g., submitting identical papers under names of different sexes, or changing known-sex evaluations into blind evaluations and watching the supposed excellence of the politically favored sex go *poof*. A similar approach is possible with race, or anything else where a symptom is identical work being graded unequally based on the student's identity. But that approach doesn't seem to translate to the claimed pattern of professors rewarding or punishing work (or classroom feedback, or whatever) based on the political palatability of the work (or whatever). Would you need equally perfectly-clear evidence to be convinced? In a world where the professors really were behaving as their critics claim, how could such evidence be obtained?
In the absence of clean gotcha evidence, our evidence is merely things like student consensus. In the face of such weak evidence of skewed undergrad grading, should we give the faculty the benefit of the doubt in this area? I am generally a cynic, and I am impressed with almost-perfectly-clear evidence in other kinds of academic assessments by modern academics: notably the Sokal hoax, the _Arming America_ awards, and the political demographics of sociology departments (rather difficult to reconcile with promotion on merit, I think). So I say "no."
You say "yes," I guess. But with how much confidence? And how exact and comprehensive do you think the evenhandedness is?
Imagine two stubbornly undiplomatic English or History students. One's politics are comfortably progressive/Marxist; the other's politics are vilely 85th-percentile conservative (especially: opposed to AA and to abortion on demand). I think you and I agree that both could probably drift through with a gentleperson's B without huge difference. In that case, if in several instances one gets a C- where the other gets A+, they still have B-ish averages in the end. But if instead they were both equally brilliant and equally highly motivated, I cynically doubt they would find it anywhere near equally easy to achieve valedictorian-level standout grades, to get grad-school recommendations, or to achieve other high-end academic-assessment-related goals.
And, FWIW, I have deviated from a TA's politics and gotten a bad paper grade (still OK grade in the course) for a bogus pulled-out-of-the-void reason. In the 1980s I wrote an undergrad economics paper calling for out-for-bids replacement for NASA's launch-to-orbit services. The TA wrote it was impossible because private industry can't raise enough capital to do space launchers. There are various real problems with contracting out launch services, but that was not one. Post-Iridium it looks particularly silly. In the 1980s, without political blinkers an economics TA should've been able to think of either newsworthy stuff like the existence of FedEx and airline startups, or routine stuff like billion-dollar real-estate projects...
I only have a year of teaching down, but let me say that there may be a real problem with your recollections. Perhaps it's a bad assumption, but I'm guessing a lot of your friends were smart, right? So the papers that seemed sub-standard to you guys were still probably the good papers in the class (it's really hard for someone who knows what they are doing to write a truly bad college paper--there's an art to being that dumb). Combine that with grade inflation, and you've got a recipe for turning in papers that you think are bullshit and your teachers think are bullshit, but that still get As.
I found myself writing "good idea" and so on next to the most trivial points when grading papers. The alternative is to stand up and tell the class that all but ten-twenty percent of them are hopelessly bad--not a great pedagogical technique.
I do believe most undergrads have at least one professor who uses the classroom as a bully pulpit, but I doubt this has serious consequences for their grades. So many undergrads write poorly, I'm sure the reasonably well-written papers stand out even if the prof disagrees with the premise, because they show the student knows how to think.
At the graduate level, though, everybody is expected to write well and think clearly, so the dissenting student's paper must stand on its argument alone. And everybody, not just college professors, expects a higher standard of proof for conclusions that disagree with their own expectations. This is normal - this is what keeps people from embracing every zany idea that comes down the pike. But it does suggest that bias has more serious consequences for a grad student. And it won't affect just their research. I've heard of students (warning: anecdotal evidence) leaving academia because their different beliefs made them feel isolated in the work environment.
I don't think this means we need affirmative action for conservative academics. I just find the skeptics who comment here a little disingenuous. There's bias in every workplace, and it affects us all every day. Why wouldn't that occur in colleges and affect students?
"Chomsky is, in fairness, a linguistics titan."
That's a laugh. Transfomational-Generative Grammer offers no evidence of its fantasy of a universal deep structure to language. It's a dead end. Oh sure, it's often hailed as a great idea, but such hype often metastasizes during the overproduction of intellectuals such as we labor under today.
Sigh. Here's what I wrote, and which I seem to have difficulty getting a response to:
Now, let me ask again: regardless of what these 'surveys' found (more in a moment), are you saying that what I've seen and experienced, what people I've known have experienced is completely dismissable?
Are the various people decrying 'bias' - which is left-wing bias, in their book - denying that right-wing bias exists? If so, I could care less what they think about the topic, because their own judgment is severly suspect. Otoh, if this right-wing bias does exist, how come these oh-so-impartial people not denouncing it with equal vigor?
Bias - in any direction is bad, right?
I agree with Joyner. Students are always free to agree or disagree with a professor's viewpoint. Whether and how a professor should advocate that viewpoint depends on what kind of course it is, I think. But one thing is sure: complete neutrality is completely boring, and also induces cynicism.
I used to teach my philosophy classes in a completely neutral way, making the best case for each philosopher that I could, without mentioning much of my own views at all. Students were disillusioned; they saw the history of philosophy merely as a series of different disagreements, and concluded that no one ever made progress.
So I started to comment more on which views I thought were better, which were worse; how I thought one philosopher made progress over another--all without preaching, of course. Some of the disillusionment started to lift. Students saw how one might start to make up one's own mind about these debates, even if they didn't agree with my particular take.
So I'd much prefer a professor to take a definite stand, when it's appropriate--even if I disagree with it. It not only helps the student to learn where the professor is coming from, but also to learn how to come to a conclusion of his or her own.
Brian Caplan?!?!?!? Let's look at this guy's home page:
or:
I don't think you want to get any information you may have about 'liberal bias' from this guy.
And what is this 'liberal bias' anyway? Charlie says that "SoV, surveys suggest that most economics departments are dominated by moderate Democrats", which I don't exactly associate with 'liberal', even if this is true (instead of 'surveys suggest', how about some actual cites and links?) Or how about this one:
So if apparently if a professor was not anti-abortion, for example, that's a sign he's a liberal? I'd say this was blatantly dishonest, except that I suspect people really believe this tripe. And further, note how if you disagree with the econ professor, it's not bias, it's because he's right, but if the same happens with a sociology paper, it's not because he's right, but because he's biased.
So, unless certain people are a lot more specific about what they mean by bias, I think we can take their claims with a huge chunk of salt.
I had the same experience as you, Megan. Left-wing biases were SO overt that they were easily recognized -- and easily taken advantage of. When your professor is telling the class that America is a fascist society there really isn't any danger of any of his students (aside from those who were already members of the hard left) taking him seriously.
On the other hand, it does encourage people to feel contempt for academia, and I think that spreads over into contempt for intellectuals in general. That's a bit unfortunate.
I found an interesting article pertaining to this topic that, serendipitously, came out yesterday -
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/27/politics
Believe me, not being a linguistics guy, I hold no truck for Chomsky. I know of him in linguistics only by reputation, not by anything I've actually read.
Honestly, if anyone wants to trash the guy's linguistics career, too, more power to ya!
On another point, the liberals here have more than once countered assertions of liberal bias in academia with a conservative bias in economics and business departments.
Let's assume, arguendo, that this is true.
Wouldn't this also tend to suggest that the more educated one becomes in business and economics, the more likely they are to reject liberalism?
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. I'm just wondering if the liberals know what they're arguing.
Jason, if you're referring to me, I ain't particularly liberal. In fact, if anyone thinks that I am, it just goes to show how far to the right they really are. True story - I once held forth on some of the political positions of some of my relatives. Who live down near the boothill, Cape Girardeau way. Rush Limbaugh country. The right-wingers on the group were convinced that my relatives (who think I'm 'liberal' for condoning mixed marriage) were 'liberals' simply because they didn't much care for Bush, didn't want to privatize Social Security, and because one of them taught at school.
So I think that the 'wingers here should be well-served by being a bit more precise when they take their shots.
Second, if you look up above, I've already made a similar point: why is it 'liberal bias' in the Sociology department but 'just telling it like it is' in the Econ department?
That strikes me as special pleading.
In fact, no one here has even acknowledged that right-wing bias exists, let alone that it is just as deplorable as bias of the left-wing kind.
Ben Bayer: I see the value in a philosophy professor emphasizing which philosophers were most insightful/correct/interesting/whatever. Or, for that matter, an economist or biologist saying what turns out to be true in the real world, regardless of whether it is comfortable to a particular faction of the left or right. But consider Megan McArdle's example of English professors giving sexual politics a significant weight on the same scale as the usual technical considerations in their field.
One doesn't need to be opposed to that particular brand of politics to find this distasteful. If sometime after the McCain administration rules blogging illegal within 14 years of any election, the McArdle Philosophical Institute of Estonia is founded, can you understand why I would find it disappointing if it turned out that to get a good grade there, you praise vegan philosophers and scorn the others?
To repeat my reference to the Sokal hoax and the _Arming America_ awards, I think there's evidence that academia has become so politicized that in its eagerness to honor that which comforts the left, it can swallow pretty gross hoaxes. I think that's pretty clearly too much weight to nontechnical considerations.
SOV wrote "Now, let me ask again: regardless of what these 'surveys' found (more in a moment), are you saying that what I've seen and experienced, what people I've known have experienced is completely dismissable?"
No, "completely" is a very strong word. I think that you have an anecote (or several), and that deserves to be heard. Most anecdotes seem to go the other way, but that is only hearsay.
My personal sense is that Economics Departments in general are not particularly right-wing or left-wing. My main anecdotal argument is the Univesity of Chicago. It clearly had (and I presume still has) a right-wing bias. That makes it an unusual standout, however, and that fact (that Chicago stands out as an anomaly for being Right-Wing) makes me thing that in general Economics Departments are not heavily biased. I infer that the George Mason University Economics Department may also be biased in a right-wing direction, but I'm not close enough to really know. At any University the department may be biased one way or another (and there were some famously left--biased Economics Departments in the past), so it's not a stunner to hear that someone experienced right-wing bias, but I don't think that is generally true.
I *do* get the sense that Humanities Departments generally have tended to be biased in a left-wing direction since at least the 1970s, so in comparison the Economics Departments have probably looked more right wing.
Adding my own anecdotes, I work went to an engineering school for my undergraduate degree in the 1980s, and did not feel any meaningful political bias from the faculty. I did see clear viewpoint descrimination in a small but powerful minority of administrators, who applied a double-standard favoring "leftist" student groups in things like booking lecture halls. I have since completed a Masters and a Ph.D. in Engineering, and teach as an Adjunct Professor in a major University Engineering Program. I have not seen any signs of political bias from Professors in all that academic work, but I pretty much have only been dealing with engineering Professors, and many of them Adjuncts with substantial experience in private industry.
Tom, I'm a couple of years behind you: I have a Master's, but no Ph.D. yet(algebraic geometry/algebraic topology - low dimensions), that's another two years away. Before that, a double major as an undergraduate in physics/math.
Anyway, I don't see any discernable left-wing bias in the physics department, or the math or statistics department either. True, almost everyone I know professionally despises Bush and his administration, but I don't think that really qualifies as being right-wing, more of a contempt for a congenital incompetent, and a politicizer of science and a cutter of funds to boot.
That's my point, though: that what reputable evidence there is doesn't seem to show much 'left-wing bias' out there, what there is is mostly anecdotal. I don't mind that this is so; I do mind that my own evidence, equally anecdotal is somehow dismissable.
I also mind that a lot of people here don't seem to fret over bias if it's right-wing bias. I disagree strongly with that: bias is bias, of whatever sort, and if one sort shouldn't be tolerated, the other shouldn't be either.
I'm also bothered by the fact that to the extent that right-wing bias has been acknowledged here, it's been suggested that it's really superior knowledge. Notice how this was _not_ ever imputed for the left-wing kind.
Maybe it's a personality thing(subtype math), but I like consistency, don't care much for inconsistency, and despise hypocrisy.
I must have been lucky...maybe going to a non-elite college as I did makes a difference? Maybe in a smaller college there isn't as much need to fight turf battles over ideology? All of my English profs were more interested in the craftsmanship of the artists rather than pushing any political point. They were more like fans promoting the music of their favorite rock stars; always focusing on the universality of the meaning and the multiplicity of meanings; on word sounds and shadings; the human condition. To this day, I have no idea whether they were liberal, conservative, or apolitical, nor do I care. Thus, reading Wilfred Owen wasn't used as propaganda for or against war, but as a means to comprehend the complexity of one individual's experience of war. Above all, the point was to appreciate the power and beauty of the language when in the hands of a master. Likewise, I don't think one has to be a Christian to appreciate the compact force of John Donne, any more than one needs to be a lefty to appreciate the gracefulness of Neruda's love poetry. And most great poets/writers don't neatly fit into such left/right constructs that people would like to believe; they are often led by the leash of language rather than the other way around. Thus, even though I am politically liberal, I truly abhor the meddling of left-leaning sociologists, historians, and economists who have invaded English depts and have turned students off to the transcendent nature of art by framing everything in political terms. Really, if I could I would kick these tone-deaf phonies out of the choir, but in the meantime I think you conservatives should do your best to boo them off the stage wherever you find them, too.
scentofviolets: You wrote "there's an obvious right-ring bias in a lot of econ departments; ditto the business wing." Then in response to my "have you found an econ department where more than 25% of the faculty are anti-abortion, pro-RKBA, and anti-AA?" you wrote "So if apparently if a professor was not anti-abortion, for example, that's a sign he's a liberal?"
No, that's not what I meant. I meant (1) anti-abortion, pro-RKBA, and anti-AA are pretty characteristically-right beliefs, (2) 25% is a conservative ballpark number for the popularity of those views among US adults (within the large definitional ambiguity, anyway), and (3) if you're going to call a group right-wing, I think it'd be reasonable to expect that they have at least the average-for-the-general-pop level of characteristically right-wing beliefs. (And I doubt you found such a department, so I was expressing how underimpressed I am at your charge that there's an obvious right-wing bias in a lot of econ departments.)
You also wrote "In fact, no one here has even acknowledged that right-wing bias exists, let alone that it is just as deplorable as bias of the left-wing kind." I'm sure it exists, the country is big enough that I'm expect it must occur every few months. In principle political bias in academia is bad, so in principle right wing bias in academia is bad, sure. It's just that in practice it just seems to be qualitatively smaller problem than left wing bias in academia, down there with myriad problems like thesis advisors who get brain tumors. If you can substantiate your report of a mother lode of obviously right-wing econ departments (and it's not the mirror image of finding geology departments which are obviously left-wing because young-earth creationists are underrepresented compared to the general population) then I might start reconsidering my impression that the qualitative difference in practice is so huge that the right-wing bias is negligible. I would also reconsider if someone has some mirror image cases, cases like Sokal or Bellesiles except that it's the academic right which has been caught in its eagerness to honor politically convenient nonsense.
Meanwhile, I think the right largely avoided this problem just by being largely excluded from the easy-to-politicize fields of academia. They are certainly not immune to goofy self-righteous politicized groupthink outside academia. And I know exactly how the libertarians avoid this problem: we are too few and too powerless. So we since we don't get the glass houses...
I suspect there are more Marxists in Econ or Pol Science departments than there are creationists in Biology departments. But then I also suspect that there are way way more non-deconstructionists and non-pomos in English departments than there are Marxists in Econ and Pol Science departments.
One of the things that always astounds me is that conservatives decry "victimization," but so many conservatives who don't get the job want blame anti-white discrimination for that (dude, maybe the other candidates were just better qualified or had greater potential than you), and blame poor grades in academia on the liberal bias of their professors. Several posters above did precisely that, with at least congratulating himself ever so smugly on being more clever than those dumb liberal professors.
I have degrees from 3 different schools and have taught in another 5 for about 20 years. I only remember 2 clear instances of bias: one when a professor in the "policy sciences" made a snide and totally inappropriate reference to abortion opponents on the first day of class (dropped thatone fast). The other was when I once asked a very distinguiished busines professor who had just given an extensive talk about the decline of American manufacturing, laying much of the blame for a focus on marketing rather than operations, whether he thought that part of his argument paralleled Marx's point about the sales effort. He squared his square, looked for a moment as if he was about to punch, and then turned his back to me and started speaking with someone else.
So in 30+ years of school, that leaves it for me at one demerit for each side
_You're_ unimpressed, eh? Good. Now you know exactly how I feel(I also notice that you haven't demanded similar figures from those claiming 'liberal' bias. So what else is knew?)
Further, you missed the point- missed it completely. The point is that you and yours are apparently very free with the definitions of what constitutes 'left' and 'right' bias. In fact, I get the impression that you think you get to decide.
Uh-uh. Nada. No way.
In the context of the Econ department or the business department, 'right-wing' or 'conservative' bias means exactly what it means, not piffle about abortion or gun rights or what have you: it means that the 'free-market' is always better than a government-based approach. It means that taxes are _always_ too high. It means that regulations of any kind imposed on businesses are 'burdensome'. It means that it is an article of faith, nay, axiomatic, that raising the minimum wage will result in fewer minimum wage jobs and that the community in general will take an economic hit.
And so on and so forth.
_That's_ what it means to say that economics professors have a right-ward tilt. Point out that a lot of the 'pronouncements' being made are in fact normative judgments, you get the evil eye, the cold shoulder. Just like what has been alleged for the people encountering 'liberal' bias in other departments.
Do you understand now?
And they say irony is dead; it ain't given what's immediately written without the faintest sense of self-awareness:
Honestly, I could care less what you think, given the quality of your arguments. How about _you_ convince _me_ instead? How about you apply the same standards to your assertions that you apply to mine? It's 'obviously' true that "in practice it just seems to be qualitatively smaller problem than left wing bias in academia, down there with myriad problems like thesis advisors who get brain tumors." So true that you don't even bother to substantiate it? Well, if it's so easy to substantiate, why don't you post some of this evidence, something that's not hearsay, or anecdotal? Should be easy, right? Or is this a case where anything posted is going to lead back to Horowitz and his ilk?
That's the way it works, you know: You make an assertion, you back it up. You haven't done so. In fact, if you had bothered to read what I previously wrote, I said:
The fact that you would try to pull the same stunt right after what I wrote doesn't speak well for your objectivity. Or your reasonableness.
When I was at the University of Michigan the bulk of the leftwing stuff I encountered came not from the staff, but from the other students. There was always some Protest of the Week damning Israel, South Africa, Reagan, Bush (GHW), or whatever other villian attracted the little Maoists' attention. Gulf War I produced a huge brouhaha on campus, as did the hiring of outside security guards to augment the university police (though that may have had more to do with the crackdown on rowdy frat parties after much of downtown Ann Arbor was vandalized following a UofM basketball championship). Worst of all was the student newspaper whose ranting editorials made Pravda read like the WSJ. On the one occasion I found myself agreeing with the editors (they were complaining about the inconvenient, meandering city bus routes) I almost took myself to the health clinic for a checkup.
That's been exactly my experience, JonF. It's always been hip and trendy to go up against The Man. Especially when the worst that can happen to you is a short stay in jail, perhaps a suspended sentence that will never appear in any official record of conviction when you graduate and turn into a capitalist pig.
But by god, you've shown the System that you're wise to them, and you're not taken in. I'll admit it, I hung out with these jokers, I was in a band whose sole reason for existence was Rocking against Reagan. And you know why?
'Cause that's where all the hot chicks were. _At_least_ half the guys (and half the girls) were at these rallies, happenings, get-ons, be-ins, etc just so they could find out where all the good parties were, maybe find a little action.
This is news to these sensitives who have felt the undeserved sting of 'liberal bias'?
Meanwhile, in the real-world as I've already noticed, there seems to be very, very, few substantiated cases of these sorts, despite some very vigilant, well-funded chaps on the right.
Remember the girl who supposedly received an 'F' because she refused to answer a question that instructed the student to explain why Bush is a war criminal? Remember how that got booted about? And what was the real story behind this cause celebre?
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/15/horowitz3_15
That seems to be the usual conclusion to these sorts of stories.
SOV:
"I'm also bothered by the fact that to the extent that right-wing bias has been acknowledged here, it's been suggested that it's really superior knowledge. Notice how this was _not_ ever imputed for the left-wing kind."
Heh. You need to get out more.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1228-32.htm
John Jost of NYU pretty much staked his professional and academic reputation on that ridiculous argument - and got federal funds for doing it.
c.f. here: http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20061222-000001.xml
Conservatives are pretty tired of hearing libs make that exact claim - that any liberal bias in academia is simply the inevitable result of superior knowledge and education. Common Dreams makes that specific argument above. And Stephen Colbert makes the argument in a tongue in cheek way when he satirizes a conservative FOX News-type TV correspondent and says, skeptically, "facts have a liberal bias."
It was funny. But it wouldn't have been funny had it not had an element of truth to it..twice removed.
So the liberals want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to make the "superior knowledge claim" when they cite studies that suggest that the total population of college educated people skews liberal. (Of course, it only skews liberal when you include all the women's studies, english, sociology, social work, art history and peace studies dorks in the sample; the majors where you actually HAVE to think critically, such as engineering, don't skew left nearly so much).
But when you take the inverse of the argument and apply it to business and economics (actually, try finance!), all of a sudden they cry foul because..because...because why, exactly?
I think there is a perfectly plausible argument that the 'superior knowledge claim' can attach to finance and business, but not to the liberal arts: Finance has to stand up to real-world and market forces - and wrongheaded liberal ideas can be seen to fail in the real world.
Whereas in Literature and Peace Studies, on the other hand, the libtards can get away with intellectual murder and they will never have to test marxist-feminism in any crucible save the faculty lounge.
Mmm, as an academician, it seems to me that it's not that right-wing thought is never found on campus, but rather that social conservatism is never found.
Also, the discussion has moved on, but really, people were beating on Chomsky unfairly. I'm not a Chomskyite, prefer lexical models of syntax, don't hold with his thoughts on i vs e language, think UG is prolly less specified than he holds, etc, but more than any other person, he's shaped the field of linguistics, and for the better (not to mention his contributions to computer science and computational linguistics).
Before Chomsky, no one thought about syntax. The American structuralists had some excellent insights into morphology and phonology, but they basically had no idea syntax existed, and their European counterparts weren't any better. For example, I have Bloomfield's Menominee grammar in front of me. The morphological analysis is excellent, the phonology outdated but insightful, but when it comes to syntax, he basically says, "here's a list of Menominee sentences." No discussion, no analysis. No grammar today would get away with doing that today.
"Right-wing bias" in Econ departments as defined by SoV:
it means that the 'free-market' is always better than a government-based approach. It means that taxes are _always_ too high. It means that regulations of any kind imposed on businesses are 'burdensome'. It means that it is an article of faith, nay, axiomatic, that raising the minimum wage will result in fewer minimum wage jobs and that the community in general will take an economic hit.
When I first took college Econ in the late 60's, the faculty at my school were pretty much all Keynesians. I can't imagine any one of them would have agreed with any of the above premises. If the various flavors of statist ecomonics are not quite so well-represented in today's Econ departments, perhaps the hard lessons of the real world accrued over the last four decades - especially the godawful 70's - have something to do with that. Steven Colbert notwithstanding, some facts, at least, have a "right-wing" bias.
Having recently returned to school to get the undergrad degree I unwisely failed to finish back in the day, I can offer some anecdotal evidence of left-wing bias in 2008.
My intro Poli Sci prof made no particular secret of her politcal leanings. All of her suggested readings for the required book review paper were lefty. She seemed much less well acquainted with non-left authors. After getting summarily cut off once or twice while offering a non-left take on certain matters during class discussion, I mainly shut up. The class was a conveniently scheduled elective and not something central to my planned course of study anyway.
In the course of one particular week, however, the prof said one thing I knew to be factually wrong and another I suspected to be. In the first instance, she declared that John Kenneth Galbraith was a Nobel Laureate in Economics. In the second instance, she asserted that Ronald Reagan had issued an executive order barring gays from military service.
After printing the list of Nobel Economics laureates and examining summaries of all Reagan-era executive orders without finding anything about gays and the military, I approached her after class about these matters. She was prickly and defensive about both and didn't immediately accept that either of her statements was wrong.
A couple of days later she acknowledged my data, but said she was offended that I had been so "rude" and "angry." I had, of course, been nothing of the sort and had deliberately not done a "gotcha" during class.
I attribute these errors to her long tenure in an overwhelmingly left-dominated academic specialty - I'm nearly three times the age of many of my classmates, but this prof is one of the few I've had who is older yet. I don't think she knowingly intended to spread disinformation. But she was, based on her comments about Galbraith in class, obviously a fan of long standing. She seems to have simply assumed the Nobel somewhere along the line. How could such a great man not have The Prize?
As for the Reagan thing, I chalk that up to the liberal faculty equivalent of urban legends. Doubtless she either heard or read this particular canard somewhere along the line. That Reagan would exclude gays from the military by executive order is exactly the sort of thing that would seem plausible to a left-ish faculty mentality and so, once heard, it went into the unexamined "of course" file.
The "rude" and "angry" remark that startled me I attribute to a particularly severe case of projection. In my experience, people of leftish bent tend to genuinely dislike - even hate - people who politically differ with them and seem to find it difficult to accept that the same is not necessarily true on the other side of the divide. There are, to be sure, leftists, like Bill Ayaers and his execrable wife, I do hate because of what they have done. Befuddled college profs, though, get the same amusement through weary resignation range of reactions induced by the occasional undergrad peer I encounter who has just discovered "progressive" politics and is on fire to spread the word to the heathen masses.
Even when a prof is not a leftist, I find the material in some classes to be obviously suffused with a leftist sensibility. My U.S. History - Reconstruction to Present class used a book in which virtually every chapter had something about how blacks were doing in this era, how women were doing, how immigrants were doing, how the "working class" was doing, et-weary-cetera.
The chapter on World War 2 had one of Hitler's "Master Race" rants, Roosevelt's war declaration address and "Four Freedoms" speech, an excerpt of Churchill's war memoir about hearing of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Stalin's negotiations about the nascent U.N. and Eisenhower's report to Marshall about the Holocaust. It also had a Japanese-American memoir of internment camp life, a letter from a black soldier indicting the segregated armed forces and a junior officer's letter to his wife expressing concern about her fidelity. Two historians weighed in with essays about American soldiers and their motivations for fighting as well as the domestic censorship and propaganda designed to influence same, plus the anbitious plans of political liberals to remake the post-war world to their ideological design. This, in the opinion of the editors, is apparently the distilled essence of World War 2 - readings from five big shots, three peons and two professors.
You will note that this list includes essentially nothing about the actual freakin' war! Surprisingly, given the rather relentless identity politics trope in play, not even Rosie the Riveter or the Tuskeegee Airmen make so much as a cameo appearance. To cram in enough of the sainted FDR, some sacrifices evidently had to be made. As for Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Midway, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, El Alamein, Leningrad, Anzio, Kursk, Normandy, Iwo Jima - not a word. War fighting is so - icky. We don't dwell on it.
"John Jost of NYU pretty much staked his professional and academic reputation on that ridiculous argument - and got federal funds for doing it.
c.f. here: http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20061222-000001.xml"
Jason, whatever you think of the research being popularized in that Psychology Today piece - which seems to me interesting, if somewhat preliminary - it has almost no bearing on SoV's claim. Nor is the commondreams essay - whether one agrees or disagrees - really about the supposed superiority of 'left-wing' knowledge. It's more a defense of a 'liberal' education in the old sense, in which 'liberal' isn't a sneer at stereotypical radical marxist-feminist professors, but refers to the vital values of debate, open inquiry, intellectual freedom and scholarly exploration, here in contrast to far-right-xtian anti-intellectualism and closemindedness:
"Instructors "need to make students aware of the spectrum of scholarly opinion," Horowitz said. "You can't get a good education if you're only getting half the story."" The "other half" of the story may not be factual, however, but doctrinal. As the young man in Starbucks said just before he and the incoming freshman got up to leave,
"Even at Lipscomb, you have to be careful what you pay attention to. My professor said that a few faculty members might lead you astray without meaning to, by bringing in ideas that aren't biblical. He said that if you're ever taught anything that sounds questionable, you should talk about it with your minister to see if it's right."
Even as a Christian raised in the evangelical tradition, this shocked me. I suppose it shouldn't have; the Southern Baptist Convention recently considered a proposal to urge all parents to pull their children out of public schools to prevent their exposure to "non-biblical ideas" which, as it happens, run rampant in fields like medicine, physics, archeology, literature, philosophy, history, astronomy, psychology, theology-in short, everything.
What will happen to that innovative American spirit if radical "conservatives" have their way with our educational system? How will the US fare in the global marketplace when certain ideas, or entire fields, become off-limits to students who've been indoctrinated to consult their ministers before learning new information?
What will happen to medical research, for instance, if this movement proceeds to its logical conclusion: outlawing the scientific method, a method notorious for not relying on biblical principles?"
----
And that Jost et al paper:
"The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature."
I know some conservatives screamed that this was incredibly offensive, but to be honest, as a big ol' lefty, it made me think on how - insofar that this is accurate - conservative strengths (so defined) are also really important to society. Sure, I really value the openness-related things, but imagine a society just of folks who are all extra-curious, creative, novelty seeking stimulation junkies - but not that hot on neatness, orderliness, duty and rule-following? Would be fun, for a time . . .
(but of course, the important thing isn't whether the conclusions are flattering or insulting, but whether they're correct, an approach that many of its conservative critics didn't really consider. - which isn't to say there haven't been genuine and reasonable criticisms).
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough, Jason, but I meant _acknowledged_by_conservatives_. I find it hard to believe that you didn't pick up on this, since I was originally responding to what _you_ wrote:
So it looks like _you_ were the one who suggested that if it's 'liberal' bias in the Sociology department, it's just bias, nothing more to it, but if it's conservative bias in the Econ department, it was really just superior knowledge.
In fact, I think I asked you once already, but I'll ask again: Why is it 'liberal' bias in one department if you don't like it, but 'superior knowledge' if it's conservative bias (which you apparently heartily approve of) in another department?
That hardly seems consistent.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Thanks for the laugh.
Projection indeed.
Y'know, I'm not particularly liberal, and I get that hate ray directed at me all the time. We just had a big to-do here, a few days ago, because people who were right, dead right, about Iraq all the way were excoriated as being cowards, America-haters, terrorist sympathisers, chowder-heads, and worse, if such a thing is possible. Heck, in the weeks before and after the invasion, our local TV station made it a policy that no one could wear one of those odious little 'America' pins while broadcasting. The reason? 'Because their job is to report, not editorialize.' And for this, we had some jerk of a congressman attempt to punish the station by having funding removed.
Yes, yes, I know, 'liberals' just make up stuff, right? Couldn't possibly be true, right? The only purpose of this story is to make conservatives look bad, uh-huh.
Wrong:
http://thebistory.org/front/front-flagfunding.html
and:
So, uh, to be blunt, I really, really am not sympathetic to this idea that ". . . people of leftish bent tend to genuinely dislike - even hate - people who politically differ with them and seem to find it difficult to accept that the same is not necessarily true on the other side of the divide."
Yes. Hence my earlier objection to defining 'conservatism' in an economics department as being anti-abortion. Say what? That doesn't make sense, unless the goal is to have an impossible standard of right-wing bias to prove.
But in general, the pattern for any professionals in general - not just college professionals - is to be 'socially liberal', more so than the general public, but to be 'fiscally conservative', again more than the general public.
And 'socially liberal' seems to cover a very wide spectrum, one side of the family considers me 'socially liberal' because I don't disapprove of 'mixed marriages'. I'm just glad they haven't found out that I don't particularly care what a person's sexual orientation is either, that in fact, I don't think it's an abomination against God.
This is actually a pretty good jumping-off point: how many people here considering themselves 'conservative', Republican, Libertarian, etc, don't really think that being gay is such a big deal?
Quite a few, I would wager. Congratulations! You're a 'liberal'!
"Even when a prof is not a leftist, I find the material in some classes to be obviously suffused with a leftist sensibility. My U.S. History - Reconstruction to Present class used a book in which virtually every chapter had something about how blacks were doing in this era, how women were doing, how immigrants were doing, how the "working class" was doing, et-weary-cetera."
Yeah - I mean, it's not like blacks, women, working class folks, etc. are really a part of American history, y'know?
(Yes, yes I know, some of this stuff can get a bit mechanical and over-earnest, but c'mon, it's an entirely commendable attempt to produce a more accurate and representative history. I'd love for us to get to the point where actually paying serious attention to most Americans isn't sneered at as being "obviously suffused with a leftist sensibility,", but until that day I'll be proud that it's ours.)
And it's an interesting thing that this so stood out to you; would an approach that focused narrowly and solely on the experiences of largely native-born white middle-to-upper class males have done so? (ie, would you have thought to yourself, gee, the material in this class is obviously suffused with a 'rightist' sensibility, or would it have been completely unremarkable and unremarked-upon?)
(do you remember the title, by any chance?)
"The chapter on World War 2 had one of Hitler's "Master Race" rants, Roosevelt's war declaration address and "Four Freedoms" speech, an excerpt of Churchill's war memoir about hearing of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Stalin's negotiations about the nascent U.N. and Eisenhower's report to Marshall about the Holocaust. It also had a Japanese-American memoir of internment camp life, a letter from a black soldier indicting the segregated armed forces and a junior officer's letter to his wife expressing concern about her fidelity. Two historians weighed in with essays about American soldiers and their motivations for fighting as well as the domestic censorship and propaganda designed to influence same, plus the anbitious plans of political liberals to remake the post-war world to their ideological design. This, in the opinion of the editors, is apparently the distilled essence of World War 2 - readings from five big shots, three peons and two professors.
You will note that this list includes essentially nothing about the actual freakin' war!"
Perhaps the course (and obviously the text) was focusing on trendy social history, rather than the rather specialized field of military history? While I think it's actually somewhat unfortunate - if it was a lower level, more introductory course, and if it wasn't touched on elsewhere in the class - it's also interesting that you insist that the list "includes essentially nothing about the actual freakin' war!"; again, would an approach that focused only on famous battles and military strategy have also struck you as incomplete in some way?
I forgot to respond to this specifically. Jason, it seems like a lot of econ ideas have been tested in 'the real world' and have been found wanting. Witness the various financial crises upon which there seems to be a lot of agreement was caused in part by not enough regulation.
Except that it's not; according to some 'respected academics' it's because there was too much regulation.
So what's the deal? If things were as clear-cut as you say they are, something like this would seem to be a long-settled issue. Surprise, surprise, it's not. So your objection has little, if any, merit.
"Except that it's not; according to some 'respected academics' it's because there was too much regulation.
So what's the deal? If things were as clear-cut as you say they are, something like this would seem to be a long-settled issue."
France.
'Nuff said.
So it looks like _you_ were the one who suggested that if it's 'liberal' bias in the Sociology department, it's just bias, nothing more to it, but if it's conservative bias in the Econ department, it was really just superior knowledge.
In fact, I think I asked you once already, but I'll ask again: Why is it 'liberal' bias in one department if you don't like it, but 'superior knowledge' if it's conservative bias (which you apparently heartily approve of) in another department?
I addressed that specifically above. See 1:57 AM
For some people, "France" seems to take on a very unusual role in their private cosmologies, kinda like the UN for the End-Timers.
I have no idea what he is talking about; could someone parse this for me please? And explain to me the connection to what I wrote?
In fairness, I'll admit that there are some things in the soft sciences I think are 'liberal', but are that way because of proven science, for example, the (lack of) connection between race and intelligence.
As use 'liberal' a lot rather than straight liberal, because I honestly don't know why some things are put into this category. But in this case, this applies doubly: apparently you're a 'liberal' who 'can't handle the truth' if you think there has been no proven connection, if indeed you think that the concepts of race and intelligence are so ill-defined as to make the question meaningless.
Apparently it takes a real man(or woman!) of unflinching rock-ribbed conservative courage to acknowledge the fact that, yes, blacks just plain aren't as smart as whites.
Something like that, yeah, I'll cop to thinking it's because the 'liberal' alternative is the superior one.
Just to be fair.
And also to make the point that this whole 'liberal bias' idea is so nebulous; I prefer concrete incidents, as well as detailed explanations as to why they constitute 'bias'.
ScentofViolets, it sounds to me like a lot of people in your life are a lot more conservative than you, and so even though you're really a moderate, you end up defending "liberal" points of view a lot, and are thus sensitive to anything that seems like automatic liberal bashing. I can relate to that, but in reverse. Among most of my coworkers and friends here in New York conservative/Republican bashing is a bonding ritual, and though I am a moderate, I often find myself defending certain conservative/Republican ideas - or at least the fact that people who hold those ideas are not automatically stupid and/or evil.
You are right that any bias is a matter of concern. I once took a class in comparative religion in which the professor seemed unbiased, but then toward the end of the semester, he informed the class that Christianity was the one true way. Needless to say, I thought that was absurd.
(I should add that I'm Catholic, and it was a Jesuit university, but I never heard any of my other professors say anything like that. When I mentioned this in passing to my dean that year - a nun - she said, "Well, he's a convert, and you know there's nothing like a convert.")
That said, I wrote my final paper on why no religion has the truth, and received an A-. So the religious bias didn't hurt my grade. And it certainly galvanized those of us in his class who hadn't taken him before to argue against him, which is a good way to learn.
However, most of the older students had taken him often (they were philosophy majors) and over they'd time they'd become jaded with him, and stopped engaging, which is not a good way to learn. And no matter what the agenda, I just don't think any professor should use his classroom as a bully pulpit.
"it means that the 'free-market' is always better than a government-based approach. It means that taxes are _always_ too high. It means that regulations of any kind imposed on businesses are 'burdensome'. It means that it is an article of faith, nay, axiomatic, that raising the minimum wage will result in fewer minimum wage jobs and that the community in general will take an economic hit."
SOV -
I have a PhD in economics and have taught in several business schools, and I don't know of even one economics or finance professor that would fit this. Did you mean it to be an extreme charicature? My dissertation advisor (a Nobel prize winner) was considered especially conservative by economics department standards yet doesn't come close to the above.
In all of the economics and finance departments that I have been in or am familiar with (except perhaps the U. of Chicago econ. department, which I have only heard about), the majority of the faculty are Democrats and the balance is moderately liberal. Such departments are farther right than most liberal arts departments, but that doesn't make them farther right than the general population, so I don't think they count as 'right wing' bias.
I've seen repeated evidence that academic research in finance is often biased against business, at least in the area of investment banking. As long as one assumes that bankers or analysts are doing something bad, other academics don't closely examine whether that bad behavior is actually in the interests of the bankers or analysts themselves. There's a suspension of disbelief as long as certain businesses are portrayed negatively, which is surprising coming out of business schools, and it biases research.
I've had trouble taking the more extreme claims of faculty bias seriously ever since I read "You won't find these ideas in a college library!" in a college library.