For more than a decade, it’s been a knock-down, drag ‘em out battle: Are American colleges hotbeds of leftist advocacy, where teaching is often pushed aside by professors who want to act as “change agents”?
“Yes!” say many conservatives and libertarians. “Many professors do allow their political beliefs to intrude in the classroom, as they try to shape the beliefs of their students.” “Nonsense!” reply many on the left. “Professors hardly ever do that and besides, college students are too sharp to allow themselves to be indoctrinated. This attack is just a cheap ploy meant to intimidate and silence good scholars.”
A new book purports to settle the dispute.
Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities by three George Mason University professors (Bruce Smith, Jeremy Mayer, and A. Lee Fritschler) arrives at the somewhat startling conclusion that American campuses are not overloaded with politics, but rather suffer from having too little. The authors don’t think that leftist politicization is much of a problem, but believe that students would benefit if our campuses put more emphasis on teaching about our political system and civic institutions. They argue that such teaching calls for more voices from the right side of the political spectrum.
That’s certainly an arresting thesis—something for almost everyone to object to.
In the authors’ words, “We do not find evidence of rampant bias in the universities or of liberal bias in the conventional meaning of the term.” They reach that conclusion by looking at data indicating that most students “do not believe their professors are biased to any significant degree” and data indicating that few conservative professors think there is a bias against them for their political views.
Closed Minds? is not a polemic and deserves a careful reading. The authors do not contend that American higher education is free of professorial abuse and proselytizing, but that it’s so rare as to be a minimal concern. In my view, however, they have been too credulous in taking that student survey data at face value. Students aren’t always aware when they are being led politically, and in fact, professors themselves may not always realize when they are doing so.
Many students enter college with a “liberal” set of beliefs and values—even those who may regard themselves as “moderate” or non-political. Accordingly, few take notice when their professors reinforce and extend those beliefs and values. If, for example, a history professor were to say that the Great Depression was caused by the innate flaws of capitalism and that it took FDR’s New Deal to rescue the country, how many students would recognize that as bias or indoctrination? Very few—that’s exactly what most high school history texts say. And if a professor were to say, apropos of our current economic troubles, that massive government stimulus is needed to “jump start” the economy, how many would think to question that assertion? Again, very few.
My point is that political bias doesn’t necessarily mean the sorts of Ward Churchillian harangues that attract attention. Rather than scalding their students with hot blasts of political rhetoric, professors can accomplish more by keeping them immersed in a warm bath of leftist notions about our history, economy, and institutions, and doing so won’t lead to much, if any criticism.
From what I hear from students and read about college courses, that kind of low-level reinforcement of the leftist “conventional wisdom” is pretty common. The professor who rants about human rights abuses at Gitmo is rare; the professor who says that the country needs to do something about the 47 million who don’t have health insurance isn’t so rare.
Moreover, the authors pay little attention to the large amount of anecdotal evidence that some professors clearly do try to manipulate their students’ beliefs. Earlier this year, I wrote about the shocking case at Wellesley College, where history professor Mary Lefkowitz tried to blow the whistle on the use of jarringly anti-intellectual readings in an “Africana Studies” course. The professor in that course was unquestionably trying to indoctrinate his students, and most of them took his side in the controversy.
Or you might think that the widespread phenomenon of using very tendentious books to get impressionable students to adopt various leftist attitudes (euphemistically called “critical thinking”—see this recent Clarion Call by Professor Stephen Zelnick) would register with the authors, but either they’re not aware of it or simply don’t think it has much significance.
Nor do the authors take notice of the statements that professors sometimes make that boast about their efforts at moving students away from their false and socially harmful (i.e. conservative or libertarian) beliefs. (I wrote about one such instance here.)
I’ll toss in just one more piece of evidence against the authors’ “no problem” conclusion. Think about the hyper-political zealotry of the infamous Duke 88 during the lacrosse case that so consumed that university in 2006. Those professors were eager to see the (falsely) accused students punished even before there was any evidence, and continued their diatribes against the students (and America’s alleged cultural evils) long after it was apparent to objective people that the case was bogus. Are we to believe that profs like that “play it straight” in their classes and merely teach their subjects in a purely academic fashion? As this Pope Center piece by Professor Robert Johnson showed, at least one of those Duke professors took her anger out on one of the athletes.
The authors do acknowledge that there is a high degree of politicization in many Middle-Eastern Studies departments. I can’t understand why they are so ready to pronounce all those other “Studies” departments (where the main point of the course is often the cultivation of grievances) and other humanities and social science departments where hard-left advocacy has often been reported, free of contamination.
So much for what I regard as the weak part of the book. It is, however, much redeemed in its final chapters, where the authors recognize that most of our colleges do a poor job of educating students in some crucial areas. They write, “In the broad nonpartisan terms in which the concepts should be properly understood, the universities have neglected political issues and seem to have taken little or no interest in what used to be called civics and civics education.”
Quite right—while many students get regular doses of political issues in their classes (usually “bumper-sticker” conclusions about hot controversies) they get little of the important background necessary for intelligent citizenship. As the reports done by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have shown, most American college students learn very little about our governmental institutions, our history, and our economy during their college years. It is a bad situation when large numbers of students have unshakable opinions on many political issues but can’t say for sure what the Declaration of Independence says.
While the authors do not advocate that colleges have a “conservative” quota for their faculties, they say that schools ought to try to bring more balance. “Citizenship as we use the term,” they write, “does not have partisan overtones, but the relative scarcity of conservative views on many campuses assuredly complicates the idea of citizenship.”
I think they are correct. Although there are more than a few non-leftist professors, the voices that are heard by students are predominantly those on the left. It does students a disservice to hear only one perspective. Closed Minds? merits one thumb up for making that point.