Do Bears, Um, Do Their ‘Dooty’ In The Woods?
That should be the name of the new John Tierney column (another escapee from the TimesSelect ghetto!). Tierney asks if college campuses lean left (I can tell you after picking up a copy of the Daily Texan today – UT’s college rag – that they lean so far left they are in danger of capsizing), and then is nice enough to share some theories presented to him by his liberal correspondents:
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’ve 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.
This reminds me of a very nice but radically liberal friend of mine who just takes it for granted that intellectuals are, by necessity, left-leaning (reality-based community, my a – er, eye!). Read the whole thing…
Perhaps the best professor I had was a hard right conservative (Hadley Arkes at Amherst — his name may be familiar because he often writes for the op-ed page in the Wall Street Journal). He used Supreme Court decisions to debate with his uniformly liberal students about abortion, free speech, the VietNam war, and the other issues of the day. I still think of him regularly because when trying to formulate an opinion, I always think “how would I justify this to Professor Arkes?”
If it is true that universities lack conservative viewpoints (and I don’t know whether or not this is true — perhaps it is another myth like the Liberal Media), then it is a damn shame. I don’t know how you can get a complete education if you only are exposed to the views of like-minded individuals.
peter, I think it’s not the case that there are no conservative viewpoints on campus – I think it’s more that they are in the distinct minority, and are sometimes intimidated by the need to get tenure in departments dominated by liberals, etc. I must say that at Texas Tech, I was pretty happy with the professors – there did not seem to be many attempts made at ‘indoctrination’, for which I am eternally grateful…
That’s good to hear, Mark — the whole idea is to let the best ideas win, and if they aren’t all represented, it’s hard to see how you can get a real education (defining education as what you have left after you forgot everything that you learned) –
MC, it *is* by necessity. Professional necessity.
The worse professor I every had used the philospohy that because students came to his class to learn from him, whoever did not agree with him must not have been paying attention.