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Books in Review
Doctrinal Candidates
Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American
Universities
By Bruce L.R. Smith, Jeremy D. Mayer, and A. Lee Fritschler
(Brookings Institution Press, 278 pages, $32.95)
It’s been all the rage in the mainstream media lately: Several studies have supposedly disproved the notion that academia presents a lopsided, leftwing worldview to students. Perhaps the most thorough of these new works is Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities. It does indeed rebut a few of the criticisms conservatives tend to level at the ivory tower, but it’s far from the thorough debunking its three authors (George Mason University’s Bruce L.R. Smith, Jeremy D. Mayer, and A. Lee Fritschler) and their publicists present it as.
Certainly, there are plenty of excesses in the conservative critique, and the authors’ jobs would be easy if the only goal were to pick this low-hanging fruit. Some pundits say or imply that nearly all professors rant in class, share political opinions on topics unrelated to the subject matter at hand, and give conservatives bad grades just for not being liberals. Some college conservatives take these assumptions to heart, and won’t even "come out" with their views; this is a shame, and more the fault of right-wing attackers than of left-wing professors.
Fortunately, while Closed Minds? addresses these harsher allegations—it briefly and cogently summarizes pretty much every aspect of the conservative critique—it does not dwell on them. For the most part, it’s a response to the more intelligent criticisms.
Those criticisms go something like this: Relative to the general population, college professors lean far to the left politically. They tend to hire fellow liberals, maybe out of discrimination. In the classroom, most professors make a genuine effort to see past their own perspectives and present topics in a balanced manner, but even these good professors’ worldviews frequently come through, and a substantial minority are far less careful. Some make subtle jabs at conservatives and conservative ideas. Others preach outright, especially in the numerous entire departments, such as "gender studies," that exist only to satisfy liberal demands. In rare cases, outright indoctrination occurs—along the lines of showing Fahrenheit 9/11 in a biology class, or grading based on ideology rather than quality of work. Because students tend to be more liberal leaving college than they were going in, it’s reasonable to conclude all this has some effect on them.
Closed Minds? verifies much of this. For example, the authors’ survey confirmed that a solid majority of college professors identify as liberal. Also, profs overwhelmingly see themselves as "honest broker[s] among all competing views," though there’s no telling as to how they define what an "honest broker" does. (Does an honest broker exclude ideas he sees as "beyond the pale," and do liberal professors tend to see conservative ideas that way?)
The book pokes some deep holes in other conservative arguments, though. Whatever hiring discrimination takes place, no one within the academy seems to notice it—even conservative professors tend not to think it happens. Also, research has shown that most students don’t change their political views during college; while those who do change tend to drift leftward, this mirrors the trend seen among non-college-attendees as well.
That last finding is an especially hard blow to conservatives; one of their biggest reasons for criticizing the academy is that professors successfully "indoctrinate" impressionable students. But it’s far from the only reason. For example, such bias can make conservative students uncomfortable, especially in the cases when professors mock their views, and it fails to present students (of all political persuasions) with the best of conservative thought. In a country where conservative ideas have led to countless policy innovations, it’s important for tomorrow’s leaders to understand where right-wingers are coming from.
To TRULY DISCREDIT the right, then, the authors can’t just show that liberal bias isn’t harmful: They have to demonstrate that liberal bias doesn’t even exist to any great degree. Here’s where they stumble significantly. Basically, the authors’ survey revealed a significant amount of liberal bias on the part of professors, but they pretend it didn’t. For example, the authors write that "most professors did not, in fact, admit to informing students how they feel about most political issues." This is a ludicrous argument, because few serious conservatives thought that "most" professors were problematic to begin with.
In fact, the table the authors provide of their survey results is rather disturbing. More than a quarter of professors admit telling students how they feel about political issues; 45 percent of respondents said their students could "probably guess who I voted for in 2004"; 57 percent of respondents said they did not "try to keep students guessing about my opinions about most issues." That’s what’s called "bias."
Even more troubling is the fact that 61 percent of the authors’ survey respondents said that "politics seldom comes up in my classroom, because of the nature of the things I teach." Look at the above numbers again in light of this fact, and only two conclusions are possible: Political bias is very common in fields where political topics are relevant, and fairly rare elsewhere; or, it’s not at all uncommon, but far from pervasive, in the entire system. The former seems more likely—in this college graduate’s experience, most professorial ranting at least takes place in the context of a related discussion—but neither contradicts the conservative critique in the slightest.
Also, bear in mind that these numbers only reflect what professors say about themselves. The stats can’t reflect unintentional bias.
After presenting their data in such a skewed fashion, the authors come to one of the most bizarre conclusions in recent memory: There isn’t enough politics on college campuses. Most professors shy away from practical politics in favor of theory and the abstract, and "genuine" political debate is rare. Colleges are no longer fulfilling their duty to provide a civic education.
Today’s colleges do seem to teach less civics than their predecessors did, but the authors don’t consider that it’s high schools, not colleges, that should handle this. After all, a lot of voters don’t even go to college. Also, why on earth should adult students of fields other than politics have to sit through lectures and take tests on the topic, if they don’t want to?
In the end, though, the value in Closed Minds? outweighs these problems. The authors shed light, always through their numbers and sometimes with their prose, on an important topic in American discourse. It’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the topic. Just keep a grain of salt handy.
Comments
Leave a Comment
Ryan| 3.20.09 @ 9:19AM
I had a handful of lefty professors at my university (Louisiana Tech), but I can note that a couple of them were very respectful of my conservative views (mostly because they could tell I had some good grounding for my beliefs). I was also nice to them, and they were often cordial.
Heck, one of my professors was more or less an avowed socialist, and I spent more time in his office than just about any other prof. I think that he moved on to somewhere in California.
Marc Jeric| 3.20.09 @ 11:45AM
I resent being called a conservative or rightwinger, being as a matter of fact a liberal. Well, in the old sense a true liberal. That name has been hijacked by our communists, marxists, community organizers, socialists, and other misfits with dictatorial pretensions.
There were three far-left movements in the first half of the 20-th century;
1) communist revolution in Russia that ended up in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - a teerorist regime that caused mass murder by the millions and utter poverty of its population;
2) Mussolini's march to power under the auspices of his Partito Socialista Italiano (i Fascisti) that brought war to his country and an end to his imperial pretensions in Africa and the Balkans;
3) Hitler's march to power under the flag of his Deutsche Nazional-Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei that caused WW2 and brought 30 million dead to his country, tremendous destruction, and half a century of slavery to East Germany.
(There was a fourth communist/socialist takeover in Spain with many murders but was defeated fortunately by Franco).
So how come we true classic liberals are called fascists while the so-called "liberals" are in fact socialists, communists, revolutionary marxists? Why are Hitler and Mussolini called "right wingers" when in fact they were left wingers?
james| 3.20.09 @ 12:04PM
This is mostly bunk. I just sent two kids through an Ivy League school, and I can tell you that almost every class in every disicpline manages to bring left-wing politics to bear, although it is certainly more prevalent in the b.s. subjects and is pretty much all there is in the political subjects like wimmins studies and other victimology classes.
Are you less likely to hear about Che in physics class? Unquestionably not. Will you get through the term without hearing it at all? Not a chance.
One of my kids dropped a Roman History course when he discovered on day one that it was going to be about the oppression of women and Africans and how the empire would have been impossible otherwise.
This whole thing begs the ancient question: Why are lefties always so anxious to prove that they aren't?
Red Phillips| 3.20.09 @ 12:42PM
"More than a quarter of professors admit telling students how they feel about political issues"
This by itself is not the problem, is it? I didn't mind if a professor told me where he was coming from. I prefer they be honest. And I suspect that conservative professors are prone to do this as well, since they likely view themselves as an anomaly. It is the more subtle assumptions that are ubiquitous on campus that are the problem.
John II| 3.20.09 @ 3:11PM
Perhaps it's a reflection of his own conservative temperament, but I don't think Mr. VerBruggen's grain of salt is sufficient--it would take me more than a pound of salt to get through the book as he describes it. I've been in academia almost forty years, and I know what I've seen and when I've seen it, which is almost daily. The political bias is pervasive, and the deeper bias is secular atheism, which the lefty profs simply assume without ever having looked at their own worldviews in any seriously reflective and intellectually sophisticated way. (How do I know this? When you work in an environment like mine, you learn over the years to interpret glazed eyes whenever a conversation accidentally gets too probing.)
There's an irony in all this. One might expect (and there seems to be this implicit expectation outside academia) that the ivory tower cultivates habits of open inquiry in pursuit of truth. But most academics among the hundreds I'm acquainted with would smirk at such a notion, having substituted infantile political certitudes (inconsistently--but hey, who notices?) as a kind of emotional stuffing for the emptiness left by their pose of skepticism.
Roy| 3.20.09 @ 4:16PM
Yeah, explicit politics is just the tip of the iceberg.
Actually, I have been at bizarre cross purposes with a lot of the conservative critique. The alleged problem is that professors indoctrinate students into "anti-Americanism". It's more like at right angles. The overwhelming view of history that pervades the educational environment is of a long, stately progression from Right to Left, with brave, bold, daring liberals at every stage triumphing over hidebound, doomed conservatives. Then the Democrats are clearly the progressive party, for highly sophisticated political reasons such as they are in favor of pot and abortion, two vital necessities for the college lifestyle. "Anti-Americanism" is irrelevant since America, like everybody else, will inevitably join the progressive utopia.
Mark Steyn thinks multicultibabble will break down under the weight of its contradictions. I don't think so. Muslims may get preferential goodies as an exotic minority, but they understand that this is on strict sufferance, only for as long as they are of use as a club against the hated Christians. If they ever became a threat in their own right liberals would throw them under the bus so fast it would make Barack Obama look slow.
The professors don't actually have to SAY "Vote Democrat". It's more or less obvious.
Austin| 3.20.09 @ 5:07PM
All of this "evidence" is from studies about what professors say about themselves. I had professors whose views were so leftist that they basically thought that that was the only legitimate opinion to have. I also had classes in which my grade suffered because I wouldn't simply repeat their dogma, but would critically analyze it. They could critique conservative straw man arguments and trash and talk bad about all kinds of things that they labeled as conservative, but if I critiqued that I was punished with a bad grade. The people who wouldn't read the material at all, but would repeat what the prof told them to say were rewarded. It was insanity. This wasn't every class of course, but enough that it made it a huge chore to complete when I love to learn. The material itself was very easy, which is what also made it a joke.
Red Phillips| 3.20.09 @ 5:26PM
Another part of the problem is that many of the self-identified conservatives in academia are of the neocon/Straussian variety. There are some self-indentified libertarians and very few identifiable paleocons.
tc| 3.21.09 @ 5:09AM
Well, you sure could've fooled me that there isn't bias here at a major university--and the pride of one of our founding fathers. I have not experienced outright professorial bias in the classroom per se; however, I have seen young hotties doing get out the vote drives and not know why or whom their voting for. I'm confronted regularly with liberal grassroots groups like SEEDS4Change (sound familiar) --OR-- am informed that I happen to be in a LGBTQ "safe zone" where if I happened to fit one of these letters then I can "feel safe" (and maybe the contrary if I'm not one of these letters). So, liberal bias is pervasive and students only spend ~12 hrs a week in the classroom--so, look at what runs their day everywhere else. By the way, did you know that you can get every book about Barack or Michelle or Sasha or Malia Obama all at the U?A bookstore? Try to find this little Closed Minds ditty by Smith et al and you may come up short......
Satsoomer| 3.21.09 @ 9:21AM
I would love to hear how a study purports to be an academic endeavor in the examinatinon of whether liberal bias is pervasive among university professors if all it contains is the self-assessment of those same university professors. Talk about examining your own bellybutton...
ResearchProf | 3.21.09 @ 2:48PM
Eager to read the book. Based on comments in the review, the study sounds more like an interim report than a polished piece. I am surprised the Brookings Inst. saw fit to publish it in this form.
I write as a teacher of research methodology.
mtm| 3.21.09 @ 4:06PM
Thank you for the review.
As a prof. and student, I might point out that most professors pride themselves on showing their students the truth. While professors in the so-called hard sciences have an easier time of avoiding slanted presentations of the truth in their field, the liberal professors have seriously altered the meaning of "liberal" arts, so much so that one could say that the entire ground on which one would measure "right" or "left", "conservative" or "liberal" has shifted remarkabley to the "left"--most especially in the following ways:
-moral norms, esp. re: sexuality, has shifted radically to the left with no small help from the professoriate.
-any familiarity with, respect for, or knowledge of the soul as known to human reason has been close to eradicated from university life...and who else can we blame but the philosophers. The soul, we are now told, is the provenance of literature and religion, by which false demarcation we are to understand that the soul is fantasy, farce, and "faith."
These studies and all of our thinking about this issue need serious recalibration--something more serious than "left v. right." For whereever the left goes, the right will be right beside it.
That said, I could not do without your review in shaping my understanding of the current situation. Thank you.
JP| 3.21.09 @ 10:34PM
Austin is absolutely right. What these professors think about themselves is meaningless. I had a lot of extremely Leftist professors (and I meet a lot of very Lefty people) who thought they were "moderate centrists." They would never admit they were anything other than the very soul of reason and moderation, and they don't notice their bias any more than a fish notices the water it swims in. If they presented conservative arguments at all it was in a laughably simplistic manner, and the only way to get through the course was to parrot their nonsense back at them.
David Govett| 3.21.09 @ 11:32PM
The lack of intellectual rigor in academia is disturbing. Once university-level education moves to virtual reality on the Web, with classes audited and rated by millions of students around the globe, such misfeasance should vanish like yesterday's bad burrito.
Bob| 3.22.09 @ 2:52PM
Academia is clearly biased to the left. This should not surprise anyone. Republicans/Conservatives have been, and continue to be, highly anti-intellectual and value belief over reason. We nominate candidates who have done poorly in school or have limited knowledge. How many times have you seen the masses on this board deride Ivy League schools? It is most obvious when those on this board discuss economics -- they cannot understand and analyze quantitative information thus taking statistics out of context in limited data point analysis.
The answer to this is simple. Value education. Tell your children to achieve good grades in school. Encourage them to go to the best schools. If you've done a good job in imbuing them with solid fundamentals, they will generally make good decisions and good citizens.
If you are not willing to do this, then don't complain -- like old ladies -- about the outcome.
Red Phillips| 3.22.09 @ 4:10PM
Bob, mindless anti-intellectualism is not helpful. But you can hardly blame conservatives. The academy sees its purpose as disabusing the young minds that are entrusted to it of all that their traditionally minded parents have taught them. There was a time when education was intended primarily to pass on the tradition, the best and noblest of what our society had learned and valued. Now they think it is their duty to disparage that tradition.
The "best schools," those that are the most competitive to get into and where you are surrounded by the brightest peers, clearly do not offer the best education. They indoctrinate you and fill your mind with gender studies, black studies, and why you should hate the white man.
A student can clearly get a better education these days at any conservative Bible college than he can at the Ivy Leagues. And in many cases it would be a broader and more liberal education in the traditional meaning of the term.
Bob| 3.22.09 @ 6:00PM
So, Red, how many great physicists, mathematicians, chemists, businessmen, etc., have come from Bible colleges? Please, give me a break. Bible colleges are the apex of mindlessness unless you want a career in theological evangelism. What is the average SAT of Regent University versus Harvard?
The truth, Red, is that if you've brought up your children properly, it won't affect their viewpoint no matter which school they attend. If you've done a poor job, then it might.
Red Phillips| 3.22.09 @ 6:48PM
"What is the average SAT of Regent University versus Harvard?"
Well Bob, I think I have already conceded that on average brighter students go to competitive schools. They just go there and get ill educated. And besides, much of that brightness is a matter of largely genetic IQ and not hard work and study. Good grades to some extent are but SAT scores are generally not. Not every kid can grow up and go to an Ivy League, and if they could they would cease being Ivy League.
"The truth, Red, is that if you've brought up your children properly, it won't affect their viewpoint no matter which school they attend."
That is incredibly naive. An 18 year old, regardless of how they have been brought up, doesn't know jack. And to turn them over to a left-wing, anti-Christian indoctrination factory is the height of irresponsibility. I would advise my kids strongly against going to an Ivy League school even if they got accepted.
John II| 3.23.09 @ 12:47AM
One quick addendum before this thread fades into the ether. When I say the lefty bias in academia is pervasive, I mean as well that the only speakers invited to campus are from the left--and the accrediting agencies (which used to perform the important function of certifying that each institution is truly doing what it claims publicly to be doing ) now dictate politically correct agenda to the schools.
So the restriction of the book's research to the testimony of professors is at least triply fatuous--and the book itself sounds like another passing instance of see-no, hear-no, speak-no: in other words, an enabling instrument of a colossal scandal.
JP| 3.23.09 @ 10:55AM
"Republicans/Conservatives have been, and continue to be, highly anti-intellectual and value belief over reason."
Ironically, the valuation of belief (i.e. ideology) over reason is precisely the pathology that plagues the Left today, particularly in the academy. It is difficult to identify an academic subject in which politically and ideologically driven intellectual malpractice does not prevail.
fundamentalist| 3.23.09 @ 8:17PM
Anyone who has done surveys of any kind knows that self-reported responses are worthless. People lie on them. To determine if the profs are socialist (they're not liberal) or not, you have to ask their opinions on specific policies.
In addition, the problem is not just the professors, but the curricula as well. Check out "Marx after communism" from Dec 19th 2002 The Economist print edition. Here's a sample:
"What goes for ethics also goes for history, literature, the rest of the humanities and the social sciences. The “late Marxist” sees them all, as traditionally understood, not as subjects for disinterested intellectual inquiry but as forms of social control. Never ask what a painter, playwright, architect or philosopher thought he was doing. You know before you even glance at his work what he was really doing: shoring up the ruling class. This mindset has made deep inroads—most notoriously in literary studies, but not just there—in university departments and on campuses across Western Europe and especially in the United States. The result is a withering away not of the state but of opportunities for intelligent conversation and of confidence that young people might receive a decent liberal education. "
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