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?
Posted by Freddie | March 28, 2008 11:21 AM