Reasonably related to Jill’s anti-intellectual conservatives post below, Cathy Young and David Schraub state exactly why this “tape my professors, win a hundred bills” schtick is completely indefensible.
John Cole pinpoints why this “anti-PC” movement irritates the hell out of me:
I don’t have a problem with identifying and criticizing those who use their lectern as an opportunity to berate, belittle, or otherwise abuse students. I don’t really have a problem with accountability and having outside groups look into whether or not professors are abusing their positions. But what I do fear are the kinds of kids who are going to keep Andrew Jones and his group in business. They are the kid who sat in every class with you and loudly and annoyingly recited something he heard on Rush Limbaugh, thinking this showed the professor was a left-wing crank. This is, I am betting, the kid who screamed bias because the teacher seemed to spend more time looking to the left side of the class than the right, or the kid who saw bias because the professor refused to call 1992-2000 the “Dark Years.”
Handing political power to That Guy In Class is always a no-no. I am reminded of a survey course I took on the major Western religions in which one kid brought his Bible to class every day to correct the instructor’s left-wing bias. Of course, being a member of The “Osama and Michael Moore are Soulmates” Left, I called foul and asked the instructor after class one day if he had a religous affilliation. He refused to answer until the last day of class, if I remembered to ask him again. Behold, he was a Baptist, a Baptist that had taught a fair, descriptive course on interrelated Western religions in the summer after 9/11.
Bonus: Cathy Young drags Horowitz into it, and that is always amusing.
UPDATE: If you actually take a look at the Bruin Alumni site list o’ offenders, you can find a lot about the professors’ scholarship and their personal lives, but very little about why this makes them poor instructors who teach biased courses and are therefore unfit to teach delicate undergrads. But no, this ain’t no political witch hunt.
Welcome to the new Khmer Rouge.
In other funnier classroom bloggy news… your post made me think of this one:
http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/01/music-to-my-ears.html
POL
POT
POL
POT
The Cultural Revolution is Neither.
Holiday in Cambodia?
Hah! Hurrah for your Baptist! That’s a strategy I’ve started to use — knowing that if I tell them the truth (evangelical Episcopalian who used to be a Mennonite but now studies Kabbalah on the side), they’ll be confused. More problematically, they’ll filter everything I say through the prism of who it is they believe me to be.
Of course, they could just read my blog. Many do. And I have students who bring their NIV study bibles to class, and want to play “swap proof-text verses” with me… sigh.
I wish more people knew the phrase “proof-text” and called it out for what it is as it happens.
Save Academic Freedom: Tell UCLAProfs.com To Turn It Up A Notch!
Hard-core conservatives like myself are appalled, I say, appalled by how many patently liberal professors Andrew Jones doesn’t condemn. A quick study of the English department demonstrates how insufficient Jones’ list is. He ignores, for example, Bla…
The academic-freedom movement I’m familiar with through http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org and others don’t seem to be based so much on The Guy in Class, but on dealing with professors who use non-political-oriented classes to indoctrinate kids with their politics.
i’m inclined to agree with you that it’s annoying when some kid sits in class reciting Rush. Class should be about teaching and learning, not sitting there correcting the teacher.
However, and as you see in the link I provide below, that’s not Sara Dogan’s and David Horowitz’s point most of the time. Their point is that your chemistry professor should NOT be saying things like, “Such and such compound is volatile, like the Bush administration,” or “If you’re a Republican and want to blow up Iraq, here’s how an atom is split.” To do so is unnecessarily alienating to students whose beliefs are not in lockstep with the professor’s.
Hypothetical example there, but more here.
For the record, I know a lot of folks might say that in the case of the Bush is a criminal/Saddam is a criminal assignment, that the student got an F because she did not do what was assigned. That is true. But I question why a paper like that was assigned to begin with for that type of course. Just as I don’t want to write a biology paper either about, “A zygote is a life because Jesus created it” or “Why a six-month fetus is not yet a person.” It’s political, not scientific, which is as inappropriate as “intelligent design” and creationism, IMHO.
Whenever I read these kinds of things, I always find myself wondering if I went to the most politically apathetic university EVAH. Perhaps it was just the times, since recently I’ve been reading about Ann Coulter’s adventures at UConn and some whack-ass ex-wrestler who’s a right-wing lunatic. I’m sure I was aware that there was a College Republicans group on campus during 1986-1990, I just can’t recall them doing much of anything. Or the College Democrats, for that matter. The most I can remember is my film 101 professor crabbing at us that we were greedy, unlike the sainted Boomers (who, of course, were then the original Yuppies).
Law school was a bit different, but the one prof I had who was an issue was confronted by the students and acknowledged that he was wrong. I just can’t imagine having dealt with that any other way.
Zuzu–I wonder if it has to do with how politically aware/active we are too. I don’t know how political you were in college, but I know that personally I didn’t see any of this, or care, during undergrad, but I saw it A LOT in grad school after joining a political group.
Horowitz isn’t aiming to remove bias, he just want to be sure it’s the bias he prefers.
Like it or not, education necessarily involves points of view. For example, you could try to write the most “neutral” historical account of American history possible, and there would still be “bias” involved due to what you decided to include and what you decided to leave out in the finite text.
As Young notes, the real goal should be “defending professors and students who are penalized for expressing any unpopular views, left or right, or prevented from freely expressing such views on campus.”
It seems to me that more educators are on the left side of the political spectrum simply because…people with that type of worldview are more likely to seek education as a vocation. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not that complicated.
Marian, I think it would have jumped out at me if professors were standing up there trying to indoctrinate us. I certainly was aware that professors had points of view, but I was not aware of any students feeling that they couldn’t express viewpoints of their own.
In any event, I hadn’t seen your earlier comment before I posted, but I’d like to respond:
If you follow the link to Cathy Young’s piece, you’ll see that Horowitz is not exactly factual or accurate on the issue. For instance, he got the Pennsylvania Legislature to hold hearings on the “Academic Bill of Rights” he’s been pushing. One of his favorite examples of professorial throat-cramming is a professor of biology at Penn State who showed Fahrenheit 9/11 to students. Except it didn’t happen, and Horowitz had to admit that he’d just sort of heard it from someone and didn’t bother checking it out. From Young’s piece, linking to Inside Higher Ed:
It’s frustrating for me because the obvious bias on this campus – R1 – is clearly conservative. Because I was in liberal arts, there were many who defied that bias, but the bias exists nonetheless. Hell, I had a teacher teach us ID in an education class.
Holy crap.
Which it is, come to think of it.
My name’s David Horwitz…and I’m FUCKING BADASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I few things I noticed…..the heading at the top of thier site has quite a few female professors, but the actual list is overwhelmingly male. I also notice a disproportionate number of professors who study race and/or who are ethnic minorities.
Zuzu–He should have backed it up, which is true, and he hurts his own credibility by saying, “I heard it somewhere.” But the academic freedom isn’t just his hearsay. Here are some actual student testimonies:
example
Again, the student didn’t do the assignment (personally, I think this “rebellion’ against assignments is silly), but his professor’s verbal abuse was uncalled for, but the school did nothing.
another student testimony and actual case of F 9/11 being shown in class.
If you want personal examples, we can meet for an all-day coffee, because I went to social work school, which claims to be “nonpartisan” but is inherently left-socialist, from textbooks to classrooms. I know someone who was almost kicked out of his program for opposing a comprehensive welfare state as most beneficial to the populace.
The same goes for NYU’s school of education (my friend got a D after she countered the professor’s opinion that saying the Pledge in class is racist and wrong; another has a teacher who goes off on how the reason kids are struggling in school is Bush’s fault).
So it’s not just David Horowitz, and it is a problem. I don’t have time since I’m at work to look up the countless other examples to prove a “trend,” but denying the fact that it happens based on Horowitz’s mistakes isn’t going to prove much.
Also, for the record (and I can’t find for the life of me the link where I blogged about it way back), but SAF has defended liberal groups as well. They really are not a conservative think tank.
Marian, I’d have an easier time believing those links were factual if they weren’t coming directly from Horowitz’s groups or if they weren’t uninvestigated first-person accounts.
On to your examples.
The first example is a guy who did not answer the question posed, but instead wrote something else. The second is someone who was in a class that required her to write a persuasive paper defending a viewpoint on a controversial issue. She was not required to barf up a liberal viewpoint, but she *was* required to adequately support whatever viewpoint she supported. She didn’t.
First guy:
Why the hell shouldn’t he get a failing grade — he didn’t do the work. Part of being able to make a good argument is being able to argue against your own position, because you have to honestly address your opposition. What he did was tantamount to putting his hands over his ears and going, LALALALAICAN’THEARYOU! He also claims that this was the sole question on the final, but on his linked paper, there’s a 3 in front of it, suggesting it was either one of several questions or one of several topics to choose from.
The person complaining about F 9/11 being shown in her class deserved her grade as well. First, the purpose of the unit was to get the students, who are taking an English composition class, to write persuasively on a controversial subject. His syllabus clearly states that you’re allowed to have a viewpoint, but you’re going to be graded on the structure and persuasiveness of your argument. Here’s what the student says she did:
She didn’t do the assignment well — instead of arguing persuasively for her position, she griped about the use of clips of the ranch and expresses shock horror! that she spelled everything perfectly but got a grade she didn’t like (she never does say what she got) for turning in a poorly-supported argument. On a persuasive-writing assignment! Oh, the humanity!
Incidentally, as Marissa Freimanis’ story spread and got picked up by Mike Adams and Fox News, Dr. Snider, the professor, received so many threats to his safety that he was placed under police protection.:
Does that sound like reasonable criticism to you?
Oh, yeah. Horowitz’s claim about a pro-life professor failing a student who was pro-choice also turns out to have been false.
Horowitz’s enemies list is almost exclusively made up of liberals. What conservatives there are have crossed the administration.
Now, the idea of calling something a “witch hunt” is predicated on the idea that the charges made are, like charges of witchcraft, baseless and wholly imaginary. Whereas, charges that certain professors hold and espouse leftist beliefs seems to be very much baseful, “this” would seem to constitute something different.
It’s not just that they’re unsupported. It seems pretty likely that they’re completely made-up.
And it doesn’t just hurt his credibility; it hurts the credibility of anyone arguing that academic freedom has been compromised.
Say I’m obsessed with proving that Zuzu eats babies for lunch. I present as evidence three anecdotes. I flog those anecdotes for a couple of years. They’re my favorite supports for Zuzu: Infant Muncher. Eventually, it comes out that I have not a shred of evidence, neither transcript nor corroborating witness, for these stories–which is odd, since I don’t claim to have witnessed Zuzu chowing down on neonates myself, but have always presented these anecdotes as other people’s accounts.
Would you accept a defense of my position like, “Well, gee, there’s plenty of evidence out there, unambiguous and readily available. It’s just that the guy leading the charge against Zuzu, the guy who’s made a career out of attacking Zuzu, didn’t care to find any.”
Come on, now. You don’t make shit up when there’s a treasure-trove of real corroboration out there.
The first example is a guy who did not answer the question posed, but instead wrote something else. The second is someone who was in a class that required her to write a persuasive paper defending a viewpoint on a controversial issue. She was not required to barf up a liberal viewpoint, but she *was* required to adequately support whatever viewpoint she supported. She didn’tt
I think you missed completely the point of my post where I said just that. The point isn’t that they got the F; it’s that the assignment was there to begin with. That to me is objectively unethical in a non-opinion-oriented class.
Say I’m obsessed with proving that Zuzu eats babies for lunch. I present as evidence three anecdotes. I flog those anecdotes for a couple of years. They’re my favorite supports for Zuzu: Infant Muncher. Eventually, it comes out that I have not a shred of evidence, neither transcript nor corroborating witness, for these stories–which is odd, since I don’t claim to have witnessed Zuzu chowing down on neonates myself, but have always presented these anecdotes as other people’s accounts.
Again, it’s possible that Horowitz is completely full of shit and is only trying to make money off of this stuff. I’ve often believed that about extremist pundits of all types too–they can’t possibly believe this, but get enough people saying “Holy crap, I’ve got to read this,” and they’ve got royalties coming in.
But having spoken to actual conservative college students, it’s basically agreed at least at NYU that there is a decided liberal slant in class. I can’t speak for other colleges, aside from the guy at Rhode Island (http://members.cox.net/~collegebias), who for all I know could be a fraud too, but I doubt it since he emailed me personally about the situation. *shrug*
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that all colleges are universally liberally biased. Lauren even mentioned the conservative slant that she’s seen. The problem with all this is that anecdote never equals data, so it’s going to be hard to statistically prove a trend here.
“One of the threatening voice mails that came to my office was from a man who claimed his daughter was in my class and if I didn’t stop my ‘anti-Bush agenda’ he’d hit me with a “cement brick’,” recalled Dr. Snider. “Another voice mail threatened a petition to have me removed from my position. An e-mail threatened demonstrations outside my classroom. For two class meetings I had police protection… people wrote to the president of the university, the provost, vice presidents, deans, the chair with similar hate mail, some of it demanding that I be fired. I consider myself fortunate that the university stood by me.”
Does that sound like reasonable criticism to you?
I don’t put anything past anybody. I’ve seen fellow College Republicans get punched during a counter-protest, and Christina Hoff Sommers claims that the lives of her husband and kids have been threatened. (again, note the word “I’ve seen” and “claimed”, aka anecdotal, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened. I know I’m not lying about the counterprotest, so..)
buuuurrrp.
Marian, David, here’s the thing. No student is entitled to be shielded from opinions and viewpoints they don’t like. All they’re entitled to is to be treated fairly. And being expected to actually do the work as assigned is not being treated unfairly.
And neither of the examples you cite, Marian, involve opinions. Both the assignments were for persuasive writing pieces — one that asked the student to take any position on a controversial topic (meaning that she could argue a conservative position, but she needed to support it properly), and another that started with a controversial statement from the readings and asked the student to find evidence in the Constitution to support it. And trust me, there’s plenty in the Constitution to support the proposition that the Founders made the country for the elites, from the Electoral College to limiting the franchise to white male property owners to the Three-Fifths Compromise.
Argumentative or persuasive pieces are very much a part of English composition and poli sci/history classes. If either of these students expect to do well at persuasive writing, they’re going to have to learn to argue the other side of an issue. They failed utterly because they refused to do so.
Here’s the difference between those situations and that of Dr. Snider: in terms of the College Republicans, they were at a counterprotest, physically present and likely interacting with protesters (and I have to wonder what they were doing/saying at the time). Wrt Christina Hoff Summers, she has made herself a public figure through her writing and media appearances. Dr. Snider was simply teaching his class and, from the looks of it, fairly grading a student who refused to do the assignment correctly. Because the student ran to SAF instead of dealing with it with the professor, the right-wing media machine got hold of the story and then people who had no connection with him started threatening him.
Marian, David, here’s the thing. No student is entitled to be shielded from opinions and viewpoints they don’t like.
Zuzu, what is your opinion of student-led prayer in public schools?
You mean the schools where attendance is compulsory until age sixteen or so? Those schools? And by “student-led prayer in public schools,” do you mean during class time or in classrooms at recess or other times when classes aren’t in session?
Robert, it depends on whether the students have school sanction or not. And “student-led prayer” isn’t at all the same thing as “professorial bias leading to unfairness.”
As you probably know. But you haven’t defined what you mean by “student-led prayer,” so I’m guessing you’re being a tad disingenuous. Particularly since we’re talking about colleges and not “public schools,” which implies K-12.
And we’re also talking about professor/teacher bias, not student bias.
It’s a very different thing for a professor to be advocating school prayer, using a position of authority, than for students to be doing it. And a student group that’s being funded by and plugged into the right-wing media establishment is a far cry from a student prayer group that’s grass-roots or at the most supported by the national chapter of, say, Campus Crusades for Christ.
n the event, I find that religious schools will give you the bias right up front. As will professors like Dr. Snider, who made no secret that he was out and gay and left-wing.
As a student, I’d be perfectly happy if a professor with a viewpoint announced it right off (Uh, and hello? It’s Cal State. WTF else do you expect?) so that I could evaluate any opinions based on that.
If it makes you feel any better, the one professor in law school I had any issue with was a leftie whose opinions I felt strayed a bit too far into pop psychology rather than sticking to the legal stuff.
You also might be surprised to learn that the thing that really set me off with him was an exercise in our AIDS and the Law seminar in which we did a role-play on a fairly au courant issue at the time, ACTUP’s response to the Catholic Church’s stance on gay AIDS victims.
You may further be surprised to know that out of all the Catholic students in the seminar, I, the most lapsed of all, had the strongest reaction to the role-play, because I felt it had strayed from being a reaction to the Church and had become a reaction to Catholics, objecting in particular to the prof’s offhanded statement that “Well, they like wine in their ceremonies,” that I took very hard as a double slam at Catholics and Irish Catholics in particular.
And let me tell you, with my rosy cheeks, dark hair and blue eyes, not to mention my name, I cannot escape the little digging comments about Irish fucking Catholics, even among those who mean relatively well.
But again, I brought it to the professor directly and dealt with it there.
Oh, and David Horowitz?
Still a tool.
Oh, and LeMoyne College was just directed to readmit an education student who they expelled. It seems he advocated the use of corporal punishment in an essay. The essay earned him an “A” from his professor. Then the administration got wind of it.
What bias? Nothing to see here. Move along.
Marian, I’d have a lot easier time accepting a modicum of honesty in the example from the Kuwaiti student if he didn’t use a bit of flagrantly untrue propaganda from the Iraq/Kuwait conflict as part of his “why I love America” set-up.
He claims a baby cousin of his, 1 week old, died when Iraqis stole neonatal incubators. I really wonder how that could have happened when no evidence of stolen incubators has ever been produced. No hospitals named, no grieving families coming forth after the liberation, just an unsupported atrocity story.
Known baby deaths in Iraq did occur when some hospitals failed to receive vital supplies because of the fighting, and if that student’s cousin died in one of those hospitals I do sympathise. That’s rather a different thing to the unsupported allegations of the heartless unplugging of struggling neonates though.
In the last paragraph above, that should read “baby deaths in Kuwait“, obviously. Silly brane.
On reflection, I shouldn’t impugn the Kuwaiti student’s honesty in relating that atrocity tale – he was only three years old during the Iraqi invasion and is probably just repeating what he has been told.
However, the fact that the “Iraqis stole incubators” story has been well known since 1992 to be just another piece of propaganda, yet this student knows nothing of the debunking, points to a lack of examination of the basis for his beliefs. The assignment he refused to properly engage was designed to encourage just that sort of reflective examination of assumed axioms, and his refusal to adequately address the assignment task shows an obtuse closed-mindedness. He really ought not be so proud of that.
One of the poetic justice attributes of “child centred education” is that the little brat/s do not manage their own education to the point of actually getting an education!
So using not-completely-accurate information in a paper is a reason for a professor to make a student’s personal life hell?
Sorry–hit submit too soon. To continue…again, the point as I made before is not that the student didn’t do the assignment correctly. I’m agreeing that “staging a protest” in the context of a school project is stupid. It was the way the students were treated after the fact that bothers me.
He told me, “Your views are irrational.” He called me naïve for believing in the greatness of this country, and told me “America is not God’s gift to the world.” Then he upped the stakes and said “You need regular psychotherapy.”
This is not about deserving or not deserving the grade. Picture the professor’s attitude toward the Kuwaiti guy happening to a woman, an African American, a gay person, etc. (because of their perspectives on their gender, race, or sexual orientation). That would be harrassment, no? It was the student’s VIEWS that were put down, which I think its completely out of line.
Marian, you’re quoting the student’s own account. Do you have anything from the professor?
There are two sides to every story, and we have nothing here about what the student said in response to the professor’s statements that led to the psychotherapy comment. Could be he got unhinged; his writing certainly reads like someone who doesn’t take criticism well.
I really don’t have any issue with the professor telling the student that his views are irrational or that he has a naive view of America. I mean, have you read this kid’s essay? He not only doesn’t answer the question asked, he goes into a bizarre disquisition on Bush and Iraq and the Nazis, none of which is at all relevant to THE QUESTION ASKED.
I can also say with authority that having a professor tell you that you need psychotherapy does not make your personal life a “living hell” unless you do need psychotherapy. I know this because it happened to me — my English 101 prof required us to keep a journal, and turn it in periodically. I had been getting As on this assignment until I suddenly got an F. When I met with her to ask why, she told me that she thought I was obsessed with shit and to get help.
The reason she thought this? Because I had written three entries about an incident of vandalism in my dorm — someone had smeared the laundry room with shit, and because housekeeping staff refused to clean it up, it stayed there for four days, during which time nobody would eat in the dorm cafeteria or use the stairwell that stunk of shit. This was also not an isolated incident — it was only one of several shit-smearing attacks around campus. So her diagnosis was a little baseless.
Did it piss me off? Yes. Did it ruin my life? Not at all. I just went back to doing the bare minimum for the journal and got As again. And I bitched about the prof with my friends and dorm-mates, who knew the score. But it would never have occurred to me to run to David Horowitz and whine about being oppressed.
So really. Kid needs to get over himself.
I really don’t have any issue with the professor telling the student that his views are irrational or that he has a naive view of America. I mean, have you read this kid’s essay? He not only doesn’t answer the question asked, he goes into a bizarre disquisition on Bush and Iraq and the Nazis, none of which is at all relevant to THE QUESTION ASKED.
I have read his essay, many times, among many other essays. I have also spoken to people whom this has happened to.
I think you are trying so hard to deny that this sort of thing could happen, that you are missing my point or ignoring it completely. I have said I don’t know how many times in this thread that I am not worried about the grade that he got. Please stop bringing up the failing grade, because you and I are agreeing there. I’m sorry I do not have proof that the professor said it. But if he did, it was a harrassing remark.
Again, for the umpteenth time. The kid shouldn’t have written the paper on the wrong topic, but the prof also shouldn’t have told him that BECAUSE HE SUPPORTED AMERICA, he needed psychotherapy.
Let’s turn the tables. You come out in class and say you support gay marriage. Your very homophobic professor says, “Your views are indicative of a child molesting tendency, and I suggest that you get help, because everyone knows homosexuality is inherently wrong and perverted.”
According to your logic (it appears), this would be completely justified. It’s a nasty world out there, and students do not have the right to be shielded from views they don’t like. And telling a student to get help is not that bad. So you have to take your professor’s blatantly homophobic views in stride, and just go home.
Oh wait…a case like this would get a harrassment charge slapped on the professor. “Sexual harrassment.” This is the problem with anti-academic-bill-of-rights logic sometimes. People will argue till the cows come home that conservative students “just have to take it” if they don’t agree or are harrassed for their beliefs, but when we harrass progressive beliefs, it’s a whole other story.
The three-fifths compromise was actually designed to limit the power of slaveholders in the south. It was southerners who wanted black slaves to be counted in full, in order to increase their own electoral power. Non-slave-owning northerners, paradoxically, wanted slaves not to be counted at all, in order to weaken the influence of the slave states. It didn’t necessarily having anything to do with “elitism” or with viewing blacks as less than full people.
Sorry to move the thread off-topic, but misunderstanding of the three-fifths clause is just a pet peeve of mine.
To add a personal note to my above post, I got through social work school at NYU by walking the walk and talking the talk. I wrote tons of papers that went against my values because I wanted to graduate, and end up with a good GPA. I would never have dreamed about violating the topic of a paper and still expecting a good grade.
However, if any professor had ever, say, found out I was in College Republicans, and made a remark to my face about my mental state or intelligence because of it, you better believe that the dean and/or a lawyer (if it went on long enough) would have heard about it.
Jon, I know perfectly well what it was designed to do and what the background was. That’s irrelevant to this issue. My point is that the elites who set up the country set things up so that a whole class of people were considered neither full citizens or fully human, which definitely provides support to the proposition for which the professor asked the class to find support, that the Founders made the country for the elites and not the masses.
Not even the student himself made that claim. He doesn’t say what happened right before the psychotherapy statement, which occurred at the end of a conversation which started with criticism of the rationality of his views. Something tells me he’s leaving quite a bit out. This is a guy who considered his take-home final brainwashing, after all.
And if it had actually happened, damn right he should have gone to the dean. But he didn’t. He went to the media instead.
Marian, you’re engaging in eactly the kind of “it’s false yet true” pseudo-reasoning Cathy Young (hardly a liberal) describes.
Welcome to the new Khmer Rouge
Wow, nice overblown, ignorant hyperbole. Is that off-the-shelf or did you make it up yourself?
Here’s the thing, Marian. I could tell you a really bad story, which happened to a friend of mine, about conservative bias in the classroom. It’s not clear to me, though, that you could draw any general conclusions from that anecdote. Even if there are some instances of liberal professors behaving inappropriately, as I’m sure there are, is that really evidence that there’s a pervasive problem that requires outside intervention? If so, why not draw similar conclusions from anecdotes about conservative professors abusing their authority?
And also, while I’m sure there’s a liberal tilt to social work school, I’m also sure that most business school professors are conservative. If we’re going to prevent liberal indoctrination in social work programs, can we also prevent conservative indoctrination in econ programs? I seem to remember being taught conservative talking points as fact in Econ 101. The T.A. didn’t mind when I argued about it, but the general thrust of the course was definitely right-leaning, and I don’t really think that’s a problem. It’s a problem if you’re required to believe it, rather than just understand it, I think.
Anyway, I suspect that inept teaching is a much bigger problem than biased teaching, for what it’s worth. If people cared about improving undergraduate education, rather than scoring points in the culture wars, I think they’d probably be talking about that.
Did they repeal the 1st Amendment and not tell me about it?
quote: Welcome to the new Khmer Rouge
myth: Wow, nice overblown, ignorant hyperbole. Is that off-the-shelf or did you make it up yourself?
Ummmm? Where is that coming from, as I didn’t say it?? Or was that not directed toward me? Must have missed that one.
On second thought, i guess that was Eric’s post #1 you were referring to. Hope you didn’t think it was mine. :-)