From The Department of “Duh!”
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005A new study confirms what most of us knew years ago:
College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.
By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.
“What’s most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field,” said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. “There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It’s a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you’d expect to be dominated by liberals.”
Conservatives have known this for a long time. Recently, Conservatives have been wondering out loud why the liberals in charge of the universities have been championing diversity in everything except teaching staff. Common sense tells us that the lack of diverse political viewpoints in an educational setting tends to diminish the quality of the education provided to students. Providing students with only a single viewpoint does not allow students to obtain all of the relevant information about a given subject, thereby preventing the student from learning all that they should.
This study also explains why the University of Colorado has scores of students who support scum like Ward Churchill. Simply put, they don’t know any better because the educators they have are all likely to agree or sympathize with Churchill. It stands to reason that had these students had the benefit of a conservative viewpoint in some of their classes, they would have questioned and challenged Churchill a lot more.
The liberal label that a majority of the faculty members attached to themselves is reflected on a variety of issues. The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection “even if it raises prices or costs jobs” (88 percent). What’s more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party. [Emphasis added]
In other words, 65 percent of respondents want socialism.
There is no question that everybody, including educators, has a right to believe anything they want. However, the people in charge of universities need to make sure that their teaching staff is composed of people with diverse political viewpoints to ensure that students get the benefit of a wide variety of opinion. If they fail to do this, students will never develop critical thinking skills and learn only to parrot what their favorite professor spews out. That isn’t education, its brainwashing.
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March 30th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
My mother actually is friends with a professor on the University of Colorado campus who may possibly be the only prof there who voted for George W. Bush.
She says he stays very, very quiet.
April 4th, 2005 at 4:35 am
What I don’t understand is why it surprises people that the more one learns, the more one studies history and the world we live in, the more left-leaning one’s ideas become. A leftist viewpoint is a natural outcome of knowledge. Rather than asking the sane question: “Why are Universities bastions of liberalism?,” the right instead talks of mystical, imaginary cabals of liberal conspiracy. It’s puzzling.
Universities are left-dominated because they’re places of learning, and the more one knows, the more liberal one becomes (assuming one is intellectually honest).
The relationship between knowledge, education, and political leaning is so deeply studied and so repeatedly confirmed that it’s considered pretty much axiomatic amongst sociologists. But instead of thinking, “Hmm… maybe I should try to learn more about the world,” the right instead points fingers at universities as if they’re the problem.
To quote a trite-but-true bumper sticker, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”