December 3rd, 2004
The Wall Street Journal has a Taste page commentary about the way liberal college professors harass conservative students.
The Journal worries, sensibly, about whether or not this produces a chilling effect on discussion. I’m sure it probably does.
But on the other hand, I wonder if it isn’t also minting conservatives out of students who would otherwise be politicaly ambivalent. I hated–and hate is not a strong enough word–all save five of the professors I ran across during my undergraduate years. So did most of my classmates. (It wasn’t political disagreement that soured me. I was a science major and politics never once came up in any class I took. They were just, as a class, repulsive human beings.)
Had one of these hated professors spouted liberal agitprop during a lecture my classmates and I would have taken to conservatism simply out of spite.
Maybe my experience was atypical, but I have trouble imagining that college students look up to their professors any more than Cinderella did to her wicked stepmother. Won’t these abuses wind up hurting the spread of liberalism in the long run?
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I was a student in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. The Engineering professors were a fine group of people, truly interested in helping and teaching. There were no politics injected. I recently visited the campus and found the same attitudes in place.
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Come to class with me. Listen to the professors all roll their eyes when someone mentions anything Bush. I had the chutzpah to criticize a woman’s term paper because she equated pictures of fetuses from ultrasound as fetal imagery designed by pro-lifers as propaganda. I had to tell her that “your propaganda is the first photo in my daughter’s baby album.” I don’t feel used. But this gal was shocked that someone would actually disagree. She’d never had that experience.It is a airless in some of these classrooms. I’m here fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way. Send more troops.
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I was a political science major and I consider myself to be fortunate in the extreme that I ran across only two professors in that department who actively promoted a liberal agenda. One was a Middle Eastern expert, who while he was reluctantly pro-Israel, also prattled on about Zionist conspiracy theories and the “brave young Palestinians” who fought in the first Intifada. His classes were actually interesting in that you never knew what you’d be getting that day. The other professor was the American Politics expert and taught classes on electoral year politics, American political system, etc. He gave me the creeps. Not only because if you outed yourself as a conservative, you’d obviously flunk the class, but more so because he was very touchy feely. If you were female, you could pretty much guarantee that he’d make some effort to touch you in class. If you were smart you knew never to meet with him in his office. Not surprisingly, a few years after I graduated he lost his tenure and position because of a sexual harrassment claim.Everyone else, while they were obviously liberal, kept their opinions to themselves. While I respect the study, I have to wonder if the situation is really all that different from when I was in school; if the students—and the poll moderators— aren’t exaggerating the situation because bias has finally been brought up for discussion. I don’t know. A clever student is the one who keeps their mouth shut regarding their political views, not only because they might pay for it in grading, but because of what their fellow students might start believing about them: in a classroom, their opinions about politics are just as inappropriate as a professor’s. Perhaps this is just my personal bias showing, because I despised it whenever someone started spouting off in class, believing themselves to be challenging the professor’s liberal bias. It rarely, if ever, brought something new to the fore, but rather turned our classes into a mini-senate chamber, where future politicians looked for a forum where they could hear themselves talk. That stifled discussion just as much as when a professor did the same thing.
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I’m struck by how someone could continue to attend a school even though the vast majority of the educators were destestable human beings.I would never remain in any environment where I had to deal with people I didn’t respect, much less pay to work for people I detested.I can respect people with views that are dimetrically opposed to mine. And I find that I actually like almost everyone I meet (although there are many that I wouldn’t want to spend more than an hour a year with). I suppose one might argue that my ability to empathise with others to be an indication of my liberal bent and thus a sign of a “flaw of relativism”. (See, I’m empathising even here.) What I can’t fathom is why someone would willing subject themselves to a bad experience, especially when the purpose is to find a new direction in life.My perspective is as a full time college student in the 60s and as a current full time college student. I find myself frustrated and puzzled when the people around me are unwilling to debate an issue, whether political or scientific or engineering or business. There are many issues where I can’t imagine any political aspect to the disagreement.For example, paper or plastic? Is paper or plastic cheaper from a life cycle standpoint? The politics of disposal aside – that is less than 10% of the life cycle – there is quite a bit of disagreement about which is better. Clearly the market has pretty much come down on the side of plastic, yet if you talk to a pulp processor, I’m sure that he will not yield to plastic as superior. If you are won over by the pulp processor’s argument, should you fear expressing your opinion to your plastics professor? If you are studying packaging, you really need to understand both products, so you can’t afford to ignore or avoid the topic of plastics even if you consider it inferior for bagging groceries.I have to ask if it is in the nature of “conservatives” to feel that they must deal with issues and people as adversaries. That life is of necessity a painful trial of suppressing ones opinions to get by.But then I suppose this is the nature of liberal versus conservative thinking. The conservative says that great buildings should be build stone because they always have been built from stone, while the liberal considers steel versus stone to be an engineering topic subject to debate.And today, there are those who argue that we should reconsider the abandonment of stone for cutting tools in favor of metal and look back at what our earliest technologist developed about 17,000 years ago.
alaskanian December 4, 2004 at 5:32 am
Our homeschooled high-school daughter moonlights as a college student. Her drama prof frequently bemoans the Republicanization of Alaska — and enjoined the class, a few days pre-election, “If you’re a Democrat, please vote.” She hopes to achieve decent grades by keeping her conservative opinions to herself (though with mixed success; I’ve read her reviews of plays he likes).By the by: Not to be unsure, but when you say, “I’m sure it probably does”, are you or aren’t you?