NationStates Jolt Archive

COMMENTARY: We see evidence of this every day on here. When leaving the cloistered, hot-house environment of academia, many students are in for a rather rude awakening. The world does not run according to what the liberal professors might have you believe! And as the below statement indicates, not all intelligent people agree with what the "ivory tower" types teach. NOTE: I could not access the entire article because it's a "premium" service of the New York Times. :p


Why Righties Can't Teach

By JOHN TIERNEY
Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views.

Given that you didn't actually post a news article for us to read, how is this any more than trolling for liberals?

COMMENTARY: We see evidence of this every day on here. When leaving the cloistered, hot-house environment of academia, many students are in for a rather rude awakening. The world does not run according to what the liberal professors might have you believe! And as the below statement indicates, not all intelligent people agree with what the "ivory tower" types teach. NOTE: I could not access the entire article because it's a "premium" service of the New York Times. :p

I don't understand this whole "liberal bias" thing. I have right wing teachers too. So what? Neither side forces their views.

Anyone who claims there is any bias is only whining because their side of the argument is not forced. So there.

Given that you didn't actually post a news article for us to read, how is this any more than trolling for liberals?
All I can say is that it was not my intent to do so. :p

I wonder if the inverse holds true:
"Not all liberals are intelligent people" :D

I wonder if the inverse holds true:
"Not all liberals are intelligent people" :D

Duh.

You can be intelligent and wrong (certain right wingers)

or stupid and correct (certain left wingers)

:p

I believe there are just as many intelligent people on the right side of the political spectrum as there are on the left. However, being politicians, the sheer amount of stupid people in both liberal and conservative parties drown out the voices of the smart liberals and conservatives... of course thats my opinion.

Given that you didn't actually post a news article for us to read, how is this any more than trolling for liberals?
Seconded.

I don't understand this whole "liberal bias" thing. I have right wing teachers too. So what? Neither side forces their views.

Anyone who claims there is any bias is only whining because their side of the argument is not forced. So there.
:rolleyes:

I believe there are just as many intelligent people on the right side of the political spectrum as there are on the left. However, being politicians, the sheer amount of stupid people in both liberal and conservative parties drown out the voices of the smart liberals and conservatives... of course thats my opinion.
And a pretty accurate one, IMHO. :)

I don't see any sort of link to anything either.

:rolleyes:
That disproves it alright. If anything, it serves to reinforce his point.

Duh.

You can be intelligent and wrong (certain right wingers)

or stupid and correct (certain left wingers)

:p
Uh huh. Right.

AS IF! :p

I could teach classes, I'm neither an (American) liberal or (American) conservative. :D

I don't see any sort of link to anything either.
Do you think there might be a like, you know ... frakkin' CLUE in the Commentary? Ya think? Jeeze! Talk about "challenged!" :p

I could teach classes, I'm neither an (American) liberal or (American) conservative. :D
"Cold weather survival" to esquimo?

"Proper hydration" to Bedouins?

"Advanced sexual techniques" to prostitutes? :D

COMMENTARY: We see evidence of this every day on here. When leaving the cloistered, hot-house environment of academia, many students are in for a rather rude awakening. The world does not run according to what the liberal professors might have you believe![/B]

Is this how universities work in America? In England, university is probably the only time in your life you'll meet significant numbers of intelligent people with opposing views - in the Real World everyone's just repeating whatever they read in the tabloids. I remember the huge row between the security lecturers on whether they should carry smart cards (which can track your movements) in the Bill Gates Lab. Some staff volunteered to carry the cards, but dunked them in tea so they stopped working. I'm not quite sure what lesson we can learn from that, except that the university clearly isn't some self-reinforcing liberal conspiracy. Incidentally some university buildings are now only accessible if you have a univeristy ID card with sufficient privileges - so the liberals didn't win.

That disproves it alright. If anything, it serves to reinforce his point.

Great, isn't it? :)

Is this how universities work in America? In England, university is probably the only time in your life you'll meet significant numbers of intelligent people with opposing views - in the Real World everyone's just repeating whatever they read in the tabloids.

Amen, brother.

Do you think there might be a like, you know ... frakkin' CLUE in the Commentary? Ya think? Jeeze! Talk about "challenged!" :p
This was already trolling as is, do you honestly want to push it?

I haven't noticed any "liberal bias" at all in uni. However, I have seen a far far far more active left wing movement within the actual student body than right wing. I mean, at the Freshers Fair, there were many left wing societies - communist society, socialist society, broad left society, respect party society - as well as many which were obviously made up of left wingers, such as the anti-racism society, student volunteering society, palestine society etc.

However there were very few right wing societies - a conservative society, and a pro life society - neither of which seemed to be getting many members at all.

I'm gonna bail you out on this one Eutrusca. You see, I'm a liberal who's also an instructor at a university. My job gives me access to all sorts of information, including access to the article you posted the title to, which I'm posting below. You may think that the article helps you make your overall point--what it really does is show how much of a closed-minded and talentless hack Tierney really is, but if you come to the argument with the notion that liberals are actively trying to keep conservatives out of the university system, it probably falls right into your wheelhouse.

But regardless, remember that this message was provided to you by a liberal, who was hired, I might add, without a single political question ever having been asked of him.

I am in debt to liberal scholars across America. After I wrote about the leftward tilt on campus, they sent me treatises explaining that the shortage of conservatives on faculties is not a result of bias. Professors helpfully offered other theories why conservatives do not grace the halls of academe:

1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.

2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.

3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.

4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

I'm studied these theories as best I could (for a conservative), but somehow I can't shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus.

I can imagine reasons why liberals would be intrinsically more inclined than conservatives to pursue academic careers. But even if that's true, it doesn't explain why there are so many more liberal professors now than there used to be.

Surveys last year showed that Democratic professors outnumber Republican professors by at least seven to one, more than twice the ratio of three decades earlier. The trend seems likely to continue, because younger professors are far more likely than older professors to be Democrats.

You could argue that fewer conservatives today want to become professors, but that seems odd given the country's move to the right in recent decades. Conservative student groups and publications are flourishing. Plenty of smart conservatives have passed up Wall Street to work for right-wing think tanks that often don't pay more than universities do, and don't offer lifetime tenure and summers off.

At think tanks and other research institutions outside academia, there's a much higher percentage of Republicans than there is on university faculties. Apparently, despite their greed and other failings, many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus.

One reason is the structure of academia, where decisions about hiring are made by small independent groups of scholars. They're subject to the law of group polarization, derived from studies of juries and other groups.

''If people are engaged in deliberation with like-minded others, they end up more confident, more homogenous and more extreme in their beliefs,'' said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. ''If you have an English or history department that leans left, their interactions will push them further left.''

Once liberals dominate a department, they can increase their majority by voting to award tenure to like-minded scholars. As liberals dominate a field, conservatives' work comes to be seen as fringe scholarship.

''The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing,'' said Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English professor at Emory. ''It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself.''

Suppose, he said, you were a conservative who wanted to do a sociology dissertation on the debilitating effects of the European welfare state, or an English dissertation arguing that anticommunist literature from the mid-20th century was as valuable as the procommunist literature.

''You'd have a hard time finding a dissertation adviser, an interested publisher and a receptive hiring committee,'' Bauerlein said. ''Your work just wouldn't look like relevant scholarship, and would be quietly set aside.''

Social scientists call it the false consensus effect: a group's conviction that its opinions are the norm. Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views, either on campus or in politics. Last year professors at Harvard and the University of California system gave $19 to Democrats for every $1 they gave to Republicans.

Conservatives complain about this imbalance in academia, but in some ways they've benefited from being outcasts. They've been toughened by confronting skeptics on campus and working at think tanks in Washington involved in the political fray. They've come up with ideas -- welfare reform, school vouchers, all kinds of privatization schemes -- that have been adopted around the country and the world.

But how many big ideas from liberal academics are on anyone's agenda? Democratic politicians are desperately trying to find something newer than the New Deal to run on next year. They're glad to take campaign contributions from professors, but they're leery of ideas from intellectuals who've have been talking to themselves for so long.I might add that the little part I bolded there, while accurate, neglects one very salient point--that practically every one of those schemes has turned out to be a failure for the majority of people, and only a success for the financial backers of those schemes.

I haven't noticed any "liberal bias" at all in uni. However, I have seen a far far far more active left wing movement within the actual student body than right wing. I mean, at the Freshers Fair, there were many left wing societies - communist society, socialist society, broad left society, respect party society - as well as many which were obviously made up of left wingers, such as the anti-racism society, student volunteering society, palestine society etc.

However there were very few right wing societies - a conservative society, and a pro life society - neither of which seemed to be getting many members at all.

Yep. But everyone points the fingers at the academia.

Why...is it possible that young people can think for themselves and form their own opinions? NEVER! Not when their opinions are contradictory to another generation that likes to point fingers, anyway.

I might add that the little part I bolded there, while accurate, neglects one very salient point--that practically every one of those schemes has turned out to be a failure for the majority of people, and only a success for the financial backers of those schemes.

Well, partially. Welfare reform knocked about 54% off the welfare rolls during the 90's and made 4.7 million people self-sufficent. Of course, it's coincidental that there was bipartisan support for this, but...

Privatization works, but only when there is an incentive for the newly privatized to compete; here is an example:

Telecommunications Act of 1996: Massive success that (thanks to Al Gore) modernized and deregulated the telecom industry, paving the way for the Internet boom and massive advances in all manner of communications. Millions of jobs in high paying fields were created as a result. (A new Telecommunications Act of 2006 is on the way but mostly expands the old act to keep up with technologY).

However, it doesn't work when companies don't compete. The California energy crisis is a prime example of this, because Enron worked with other companies (the ones they were supposed to compete against, no less) to corner the market and price gouge even though there was no reason for supply shortages.

Is this how universities work in America? In England, university is probably the only time in your life you'll meet significant numbers of intelligent people with opposing views - in the Real World everyone's just repeating whatever they read in the tabloids. ... the university clearly isn't some self-reinforcing liberal conspiracy.
It's not the only time in your life you'll meet intelligent people. Some of them are on here, for example. Some will be in your workplace. Some you'll meet through other organizations. Intelligence is definitely NOT the exclusive property of either univiersities or their faculties.

There are several factors at work in the US to make universities virtual bastions of liberalism:

* Many of the anti-Vietnam-war people fled to the cloistered halls of acadamie to escape the draft, since there were college deferrments.

* There has been a myth for many years in the US that intellectual = liberal. Obviously ( if you're at all fair ), this is not the case. Yet the myth persists in certain circles, and is self-perpetuating since it serves the interests of those liberals who already occupy most of the professorships at major universities.

* Since the '60s acadamie has been heavily liberal. This becomes a self-perpetuating process, since like attracts like. There are instances of highly qualified people applying for professorships who were turned down because they weren't "politically correct."

These and other factors have tended to make academia more and more heavily liberal.

This was already trolling as is, do you honestly want to push it?
YOU'RE accusing ME of "trolling???" Aahahahahahahahahaha! OMG, that's funny! :D

I'm gonna bail you out on this one Eutrusca. You see, I'm a liberal who's also an instructor at a university. My job gives me access to all sorts of information, including access to the article you posted the title to, which I'm posting below. You may think that the article helps you make your overall point--what it really does is show how much of a closed-minded and talentless hack Tierney really is, but if you come to the argument with the notion that liberals are actively trying to keep conservatives out of the university system, it probably falls right into your wheelhouse.

But regardless, remember that this message was provided to you by a liberal, who was hired, I might add, without a single political question ever having been asked of him.

I might add that the little part I bolded there, while accurate, neglects one very salient point--that practically every one of those schemes has turned out to be a failure for the majority of people, and only a success for the financial backers of those schemes.
Thank you for posting that.

Yep. But everyone points the fingers at the academia.

Why...is it possible that young people can think for themselves and form their own opinions? NEVER! Not when their opinions are contradictory to another generation that likes to point fingers, anyway.
Oh brother. :rolleyes:

Some you know, like ... proof of this would be nice. :p

Oh brother. :rolleyes:

Some you know, like ... proof of this would be nice. :p

Proof of what? That political beliefs don't influence teaching? (as I said, I have right wing-lecturers too) Or proof that young people can formulate their own opinions? (I made up my own mind over what is right, thankyou very much) Or proof that people pointing fingers are doing so because they are concerned with the predominantly left-leaning nature of younger people running counter to their own beliefs? (well, duh.)

This thread qualifies as trolling. If you're going to post an article, post it all here and give a link. Using part of the article to attack a group of posters (1 sentence of an entire article) is exactly what this is. If you don't have access to the entire article, it's probably best to not post it. Look for another source.