Mudita Journal

Liberal Bias in Academia

December 3, 2004 · Filed under: Personal, Politics
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Shortly before the November election, a graduate student in the UNM Psychology department had the department secretary distribute, to all graduate students in the department, a last-minute announcement encouraging us to buy tickets to an upcoming Michael Moore appearance at UNM.

It was the first time I had seen the department’s distribution list used to promote a (non-psychology-related) political event, and I was struck by the author’s assumption that no one would be offended by being solicited in this fashion.

I wrote a lengthy reply in which I raised questions about the appropriateness of using the department secretary’s distribution list in this fashion. (It’s certainly not why I gave my e-mail address to the department, and I found the Moore announcement mildly offensive, if only because of its presumptuousness.)

In response, I was accused of being a conservative. Heh.

A brief discussion ensued; and based on some of the responses I received privately and publicly, I believe the original student to have been largely naive about both the volatility of such an announcement at such a time, and the appropriateness of using departmental resources to promote this kind of event.

I found myself wondering whether my fellow graduate students (who are overwhelmingly liberal themselves) understand just how prevalent and unhealthy the liberal bias is, in the university setting. Along those lines, I found this new article quite interesting:

The New York Times reports that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.

Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. “Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent,” writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, “deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. … Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition.”

Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors “frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course,” 48 percent said some “presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided,” and 46 percent said that “professors use the classroom to present their personal political views.”

Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students’ right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe — liberals and conservatives alike.

“If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment,” says ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, “there would be an uproar.” That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand — like the one-party conformity it flows from — they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.

See the full article for additional information. (And thanks to Instapundit for pointing it out.)

UPDATE: More from the Economist.

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