Who cares, indeed, Scott

In the abstract, education should be about caring.

In a real-world environment where there is NO incentive (and requirement) for high performance, where many are shielded from demands for solid performance by unionized civil service — caring is exactly the issue.

Why, in such an environment, one could have phony claims of ethnic heritage, repeated pedantic claims that Stalin was misunderstood, multiple layers of questionable bureaucracies, intellectual and artistic theft, exams that a memorizing 8th-grader could pass, lack of authentic accountability, PR before actual results, never an uplifting word about the working-class people subsidizing U.S. higher-ed, and .. ah, you know the rest ..

Who cares, indeed.

Russ, at 6:20 am EDT on March 27, 2008

‘The student body is white and asian- who cares?’

Double standard, at 6:50 am EDT on March 27, 2008

“But the study — notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor — finds no evidence of indoctrination. Despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years”

This completely miscomprehends the nature of the concern. The concern is not that leftists are successful at politically indoctrinating students, but that they are sacrificing instruction in order to vent political frustrations before a captive audience. Faculty are hired to teach, not to conduct political tirades in class. Math class, for example, is no place to rant about how much anyone hates George Bush.

JBM, at 9:45 am EDT on March 27, 2008

Slight corrections

Scott Jaschik wrote that I said “that the authors could have done more tracing why students move from one political category of identification to another.”

In our phone conversation, I think I said the authors could have done more on HOW students move, not why they move.

In particular, I’d like to see the following:

1) Divide the institutions in quintuples by faculty political view. Put the five categories along the horizontal axis.

2) Then make a chart for each of the five ideology answers. Each chart is for freshman student political view. The first chart would be all those freshman who said they were Far Left. In that chart, then show how such students averaged four years later, by the quintuples along the horizontal axis. That would be a simple way to look at the data and see if Far Left students move more at schools with more/less Left faculty, etc.

3) Do the same for each of the other four political-view answers the freshmen chose from.

4) The result is five separate charts indicating whether faculty views matter. In each chart, draw a line connecting the five dots. If, for example, the line is upward sloping in all five charts, then that would be evidence that faculty views have a systematic effect.

Daniel Klein, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, at 9:45 am EDT on March 27, 2008

Education is about more than caring it is about the creation and transfer of knowledge. With the academy devoid of any meaningful representation from outside the liberal orthodoxy one has to wonder where knowledge creation and transfer in marginalized areas (i.e. conservatism and libertarianism) will come from. For now it comes mainly from think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton serves as a good model for how conservative, libertarian, free market, and limited government ideas can be examined, studied, probed, and developed on the modern American campus. Hopefully such programs can be created at many other colleges.

What is ultimately an appropriate goal of education is not to persuade students to identify with one particular ideology or to vote this way or that way but to build an understanding as to why they vote the way they do, why they adopt an ideology, and what lenses do they use to view and make sense of the world around them. Thomas Tritton admits in a recent article (March, 3) on InsideHigherEd that he had difficulty in finding serious texts from a rightward viewpoint to explore the concept of social justice for a class he taught on that subject at Harvard. That a former college president would have difficulty in just locating serious rightward texts regarding social justice let alone be able to provide a deep and multifaceted analysis of such perspectives highlights a serious blind spot in American higher education that has the ultimate outcome of students leaving our institutions without an authentic understanding of right-of-center perspectives and beliefs.

Brent, Knowledge, at 10:10 am EDT on March 27, 2008

Prove it

” .. We just do it for less pay and benefits ..”

—-

OMG! People are being forced to work for less pay and benefits! Someone help them, please!

A lot of people authentically know what unionized civil-service edjamacators do — how jejune their commitment is, how retromingent their attempts at rationalizing their salaries are. That’s why charters and vouchers are so popular.

Don’t like the working conditions? Then go. Quit. Get out. Leave. Get that “better job” that is always over the next hill. There are lots of qualified replacements.

Otherwise — just do the job without the politics and open complaining. Before the taxpayers privatize the work and true work output is revealed.

Russ, at 3:45 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Maybe if college teachers made more money ...

... more of them would be Republicans and David Horowitz wouldn’t have to rant about liberal higher education so much. (NOTE: Yes, I think that’s as silly an idea as you do.)

I guess that Horowitz would no more be interested in the reasons a majority of college faculty favor liberal causes than he would be interested in knowing the differences between my own values and what I teach (I teach communication—a subject with which Mr. Horowitz likely approves). My religious beliefs (I’m Catholic) are stronger than my political beliefs (mostly moderate, sometimes liberal) ... Does that mean I’m ‘indoctrinating’ people about Catholicism (instead of teaching them about communication)? Does that mean I am unqualified to teach Presbyterians or Muslims? I don’t teach politics or religion. In much the same way, Horowitz writes—but that doesn’t make him a journalist.

David Horowitz isn’t about giving people (young or old) exposure to a wide range of facts, theories and ideas. He is dedicated to ‘conservative indoctrination.’ On college campuses, professionals expose students to that range of facts, theories and ideas—no matter who they voted for in the last election. Maybe it’s not that David Horowitz dislikes academics ... maybe he just can’t understand how the majority of us can do our jobs effectively by trying to be objective.

Thomas A. Lamonica, Instructor of Public Relations at Illinois State University, at 6:05 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Undergraduates and Diverse Ideas

To Brent of marginalized libertarianism. Sounds good for small business. How about multinational corporations? Would you also welcome marginalized libertarian socialism? Should students even know what that is?

To Russ: In your next life be born a campesino on an hacienda. Grow up just before NAFTA is being negotiated. Be grateful that neither you nor your working brothers and sisters en el Norte were invited in on the negotiations. When NAFTA tractors you off the land (as happened to the Okies in the Dust Bowl) don’t whine. Go seize that “better job,” albeit “illegally” across some border. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. It can be a good, disciplined, privatized job. But an idea propounded by libertarian socialism is that a citizen is a citizen whether consuming or producing, and has a voice in the terms and conditions of her or his work. Period. What if studies showed that direct democracy on the job is so productive that people would have to talk themselves out of working so much to avoid the over production that causes unsustainable consumption? Worth investigating. Falsifiable hypotheses abound, including the conservative one that says ONLY privatization can be productive.

On Conservatism: Two of my favorite American Founding Fathers is Ben Franklin and Frederick Douglass. Both espoused grit, determination, hard work, thrift, freedom and virtue. Many are the great Founding Mothers of this land too: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jocobs.

Speaking of Truth, there is truth and value in a great many -isms, all things considered (oh, but they aren’t.) I’m wary of the limited liberal-conservative debate in society at large, and, if this article is true, the predominantly, merely “liberal” orientation of most college professors. It’s anemic.

Russ, sorry for the teasing. You may not even be a proponent of NAFTA. It’s just that my fellow Texan Jim Hightower once said that, for the reasons I give above, that treaty is NOT North American, it’s NOT Free, it’s NOT Trade, and it most certainly is NOT an Agreement. Notice that when NAFTA is mentioned it’s only because it MAY have adversely affected workers in Ohio (with reference to the 2008 election.) It is NEVER mentioned as a factor in the immigration debate, a good instance of liberal media bias, if you ask me.

Thatcher, at 6:05 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Re: why conservatives don’t become academics

I’m fairly conservative, and am studying for a Political Science PhD. I am the only person in my PoliSci classes to espouse a conservative viewpoint; if there are other conservatives, they’re smart enough to keep their heads down. The groupthink is overwhelming.

I have serious reservations about making a career in a place where my views of society are assumed to be backward as a matter of course.

An alternative is to go full-time into finance, my other occupation—not merely “because of the money,” (of which there isn’t much for me right now) but because the work I do in finance is just as meaningful to society as other, supposedly loftier professions. Conservatives by and large are not greedy; consider the large amount we give to charity. However, we are not actively prejudiced against commerce, as highly educated liberals often are.

Mastiff, Grad Student at somewhere in Virginia, at 8:35 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Misses the point

This article misses the point. Just because America’s youth successfully resist indoctrination (to the extent it occurs) does not mean that they leave college with an education. After all, listening to ranting Marxists & feminists for four years may be uninspiring, but it is also not especially worthwhile.

In short, the left-wing professoriate is simply wasting the time of our youth.

Dan King, at 8:45 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Same old song

On Mr. Horowitz and “indoctrination,” an inconvenient fact: he admits to being a “red-diaper baby” and SDS leader before the Black Panther Party convinced him otherwise. Guess how?

http://booktv.org/program.aspx?Pr...tionName=In%20Depth&PlayMedia=No

On monolithic politics, inconvenient fact of history: the Democrats controlled Congress for nearly 50 straight years in the 20th Century. Monolithic — nah. Just the way those lying calendar-makers have spun what 50 years feels like.

As to lib-burr-als in the military — congratulations on making Mr. Horowitz’s point on ideological diversity for him.

At the military academies (publicly-funded equivalents of the Ivies), well-known lib-burr-als are often invited to speak. And instead of this kind of reception —

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VAtUz7JM7TI

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VAtUz7JM7TI

the lib-burr-al speakers are treated with what used to be known as common decency. Instead of crude, boorish, and doltish imitations of the House of Commons.

Great job, making Mr. Horowitz’s point on ideological diversity for him. Good work!

Russ, at 9:30 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Charity

Mastiff,

The poet William Blake wrote, “Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor.”

LogicalSC,

So you don’t like marxism/communism. You didn’t say how you feel about libertarian socialism. Or progressive populism.

If big government = no good, then private contractors (namely military industries, but many others too) should make money in the free market and not work for the government, overcharging taxpayers while underpaying its employees (I’m now thinking of the Corrections industry) and stoking these negative needs.

We should privatize the fire department. I buy a subscription and the fire fighters put out the blaze if my house catches fire while my unsubscribed neighbor’s house goes up, even if it caught fire from my burning house.Such is the problem of externalities, as even Milton Friedman conceded.

Like it or not; we’re all in this together. Marx was right when he admitted that capitalism was the most productive, wealth-producing institution ever devised. He was right when he said non-capitalized countries like those in eastern Europe should NOT go communist. They needed to go through capitalism first. (He was big on dialectic, you know.) He was also vague on just what the capitalized countries should replace capitalism with. Many of his followers thought they knew, but were wrong to assume you need a vanguard party to impose communism on populations. No need to repeat that sad tale.

But what would you say, now that capitalism has given (some of) us so much, along with advanced technology, and a limited amount of democracy, to transforming its energies into something more democratic, more manageable, more socially responsible and environmentally sustainable? And without a vanguard party.

Thatcher, at 10:10 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Question about study

Are the categories used in the study based on responses to specific questions, or self-identification? If the latter, it’s worthless, because views that may have seemed “far left” when one starts college may seem “moderate” by the time one graduates after majoring in, say, Women’s Studies.

Another question is whether there is a substantial difference in political movements among students with different majors. Do the more “political” departments actually succeed to some degree in indoctrinating?

David Bernstein, at 5:10 am EDT on March 28, 2008

Study design faulty

If I grew up in a small farm community and my parents made $40,000 a year, I might regard our family income as average.

But after four years interacting with others at Columbia and living in NYC , I might regard my family as poor.

So with this study. After four years of exposure to a liberal leaning faculty the students idea of where the middle is might change leftwards. Thus he himself might shift left, but regard himself as being on about the same spot on the scale.

John, at 5:10 am EDT on March 28, 2008

as a professor and a father,

I care. I would prefer that my children (and students in general) be taught by people who are capable of thinking rather than mindlessly spewing leftie beliefs.

I take great care to ensure that my students have no idea what my politics are; I consider that to be the bare minimum of bringing professionalism to the job.

RJ, at 5:10 am EDT on March 28, 2008

R.J., Mastiff

R.J. Takes all kinds. Some teach better being apolitical in the classroom. I myself was more inspired by political teachers. I had “conservative,” “liberal,” and (thank goodness) “radical” teachers who threw the conservative/liberal debate into a whole new light for me. The apolitical ones I experienced as boring.

Mastif: Your remark makes perfect sense—in a vacuum. I’ve already offered the example of NAFTA in this thread. Consider also the 10,000 or so farmer suicides in India since about the late 1980s (see Vandana Shiva for the full analysis). They were not in a “natural resting state” but collectively managing their own farms and doing just fine. Mansanto and other multinational corporations moved in, influenced local governments and banking practices in order to force new, non-reproducing seeds on the farmers. It threw the farmers into a market competition against each other. Next thing you know, the farmers were working themselves to death and becoming not only poor, but going into debt. The seeds, moreover, were engineered to grow crops susceptible to pests, so the farmers must go farther into debt purchasing pesticides from Mansanto, et. al. Meanwhile, executives and stockholders at Mansanto, et. al. are getting rich thinking only in terms of how hard they’re working to organize all this and wondering why the whole world doesn’t adopt their similarly conservative values on how to be prosperous.

One farmer I heard of asked his lifelong friend for an extension on his loan. His friend, himself so corrupted by the profit motive, said, “Sure, I’ll take your wife instead.” The farmer, unable to stand that violence to his wife and himself drank the pesticide in protest.

So you see, Mastiff. This and countless other examples attest to Capitalism’s NEED to make somebody poor. I’m afraid the “objectivist” take is ahistorical and apolitical. It is not reason. Logical notions lifted out of historical context, I’m afraid, can serve that larger, social ego defense known as Rationalization. Take comfort. It’s not exclusive to a “conservative” mind set. All persuasions are susceptible to rationalization. That’s why we all need each other. You have eyes for things I can’t see. Read Vandana Shiva’s account. Read opposing accounts. Tell me what I’m missing here.

Respectfully submitted.

Thatcher, at 7:35 am EDT on March 28, 2008

Data disconnect

While the findings very much comport with my own experiences as both a student and a professor, the data reported in the table are very much at odds.

The changes here strike me as more than “slight shifts.” The number of students self-identifying as “far left” more than doubles while the “far right” cohort drops nearly a third. There’s a ten percent drop in conservatives and a 25 percent jump in liberals. That’s hardly insignificant.

JamesOTB, Managing Editor at The Atlantic Council of the United States, at 8:20 am EDT on March 28, 2008

That isn’t a slight shift

That’s a nearly 8% increase in the combined leftist/liberal columns. Calling this a “slight” or “minimal” increase is spin. Only a brainwashing leftist would think it “slight” or “minimal".

Steve T, at 8:50 am EDT on March 28, 2008

GIGO

I’d like to know how the five categories were defined. If this is another example of self identification then the data is totally worthless. A vast majority of people consider their own views to be moderate and reasonable. If the moderates in the survey were self identified then they could all be Baptists as freshmen and Marxists as seniors. Unless there is a rigid definition of views that define each category the whole exercise is simply playing with numbers and about as useful as determining how many angels can dance on a pinhead.

Educators use statistics like drunks use lampposts, more for support than illumination.

Ken Hahn, at 2:10 pm EDT on March 28, 2008

Logical SC

I agree. But can you not see that capitalism is itself an elaborate rationalization for its own kind of vanguardism, complete with all the features you describe? (See my NAFTA and farmer suicides exs. above, just to scratch the surface.)For those capitalism favors, it seems to work wonderfully. For those necessarily excluded, it leads to vulnerability and excites the predatory instincts, leading to oppression and ultimately to capitalist dictatorships of the kinds that corporations love because they so often create “favorable business climates.” The literature available on this is extensive. Students ought to know as much about it as they ought to know about the crimes of Communism.

The “Communist” systems will speak of trade-offs: “At least we have universal health care, full employment, cradle-to-grave security.” The “Capitalist” systems will say it is more productive to forego those things. In either case, however, there is a professional managerial class used as overseers (that’s Anglo for the Latinate “supervisors.")

We might therefore conclude that humans, no matter what economic mode of production theyconcoct, need hierarchical, oppressive systems. My point is that higher education does not let students jump to conclusions. It leaves such questions open. Indoctrination, no; investigation, yes. One side fears that educators who invite students to investigate the amazing and wonderful feats of capitalism are indoctrinating students toward rightwing dictatorship. Another side panics at the prospect of inviting students to investigate capitalism’s dark side, fearing this will result in a mindless lurch toward Left wing dicatorship.

What about inquiring also into the concept of libertarian socialism (defined as maximizing individual freedom through, for one thing, self-mangagement on the job),socialism defined as socially responsible economics?

Can the impasse between individual freedom and social equality be solved? What the Right fears is that, yes, society may have to give up its own version of a vanguard, namely, the super rich who own and control a disproportiante amount of means, who hire managers to overseetheir “plantations,” thereby depriving the rest of the population control over both its individual freedoms and its sense of solidarity. Maybe it is now humanly possible to have freedom, innovation, AND health care, full employment and cradle-to-grave security for all (not just a “vanguard"), achieved through a purer form of democracy than we ever thought possible. The stale “liberal-conservative” debate will never break out of its own impasse, which is why it’s of no great significance whether the data in the article shows no movement or some movement toward one side or the other. It’s not innovation; it’s thinking trapped inside a certain, proverbial box.

Thatcher, at 10:25 am EDT on March 29, 2008

Professors/Faculty

As a conservative 17-yr-old headed off to college on my first day in my first political science class, the prof (overseeing 200 of us in a large circular auditorium) wanted those who were pro-life to raise our hands. Just 3 of us did...and got booed. The professor made some snide comment about “educating” us on the world. This was in 1981. I recall conservative speakers not often being invited to campus. When they were, faculty protested right along students. Conservative speakers (few and far between) were booed so we couldn’t hear them speak. Talk about “tolerance” and “diversity” and “inclusion” being buzz words. I have lived thru a liberal college education and this was in the heartland, not a large city. My guess is the authors of the study went in jaded; they got the results they wanted. They are perhaps no different than the typical SAD mass media of today....biased and with an agenda. We have dumbed down public education in this country and we will, as a workforce, SUFFER.

Nonny, at 1:50 pm EDT on April 2, 2008

Revelations

As a former student of a state college, a university, a private graduate school, and some community college, I offer my observation that I do not recall any indoctrination or bias from instructors, unless being encouraged to consider both sides of an issue constituted bias.

What I DO recall from almost every job I’ve ever had is the sneering contempt that many business persons hold for teachers and educational personnel (K-12 and higher education alike). For all the rhetoric of how important education is, businesses and the private sector seem loathe to pay for it.

However, having seen the dismal results of privatized, skill-based ‘classes’ that many businesses offer to their workers, I question the sanity of any ROI argument that would favor privatized vocationalism over a progressive liberal-arts education. **Please note: ‘liberal’ in the original sense of the word, not the chummy grenade it’s been turned into by polemical commentators.

Every other developed country in the world gets it when it comes to education. I fear that all we’re going to get — if the postings here and elsewhere are any indication — is shrill, pointless keening as our ability to compete is eroded past the point of recovery.

Kerry, at 10:45 am EDT on May 17, 2008

Noramlly, I’d ignore this sort of thing...

...especially given that the thread is not one about economic systems, but Thatcher writes:

“So you see, Mastiff. This and countless other examples attest to Capitalism’s NEED to make somebody poor.”

As opposed to the countless examples of how collectivism and statism have actually MADE countless numbers of people poor or distraught by taking their livelihood and pressing it into the ownership of the state. Whether that is the need of collectivism and statism, is certainly debatable, in so much as economic and political ideologies themselves have “needs.”

This sort of thing plays both ways, you see. Cherry-picking examples only raises your blood pressure. It hardly proves anything.

Hello, at 11:37 am EDT on September 24, 2008