Political views of Professors expressed in class

[satricion]

There are some subjects that you can not study if you have certain political beliefs.

The simple fact is that you can not study and use sociology if you are going to be a neo-conservative. The neo-liberal, neo-con view of human beings and their relationship to society and the world is just completely incompatible with sociology which emphasises the social construction of knowledge and the subject.

If you are pissed off because your social science teacher won't agree that we are all rational individuals in a meritocratic society you should either reconsider your own views in light of the different information, viewpoints and arguments which higher education is going to present you with, or go back to studying engineering. Saying that knowledge is socially constructed or free markets do not lead to democracy is not an example of some horrible political bias, but is (if your teachers are worth the paper their Phd's are printed on) the result of a tremendous amount of theory and empirical research.

If you do review all of the information presented with you and still retain opinions that conflict with those of your teacher then write a well researched, well argued paper and you should get a good grade. If you don't get a good grade just because you disagree with your teacher then your teacher is crap and you should appeal. However, you also need to be open to the idea that your paper was crap and you should reconsider whether or not you may have missed the point of the course, or indeed of higher education in the social sciences in general.

I've written papers arguing against the views of my teachers and I've always done well.

So as a final word...if you study, say, sociology and you get pissed off that they claim we're not rationally acting individuals, go and study economics instead, because this view is not the political bias of your teacher. If you study psychology and you're pissed off by the biomedical paradigm of the DSM (volume III and onwards) then go and study something else because these assumtions are built in to the logic of the discipline.

 

[DigitalDuality]

I think... colleges are probably mostly liberal. There's no doubt about it.

But the way i see it, the majority of this country is conservative. The majority of people who vote Democrat..are conservatives. The work places most of us will spend our years? Filled with conservatives. The atmosphere to our public school system? I'd say conservative leaning. (at least the ones i've been too).

I think it's an educator's job to get a student to learn to look at things from other perspectives, perspectives you might not be so accustomed to. So if the children of america are subjected to 4 years in certain classes to "liberalism" so be it. Cry me a fucking river.

The ability for alot of people to take their heads out of the Church of the GOP's ass, will be good for them. If they can write an arguementative paper, from a particular perspective that may not be their own and understand the other side of the arguement.. rather than the continual echoing of AM radio talking points filtered down through their parents and peers, then it'll do them some good.. even if they remain conservative as hell.

Don't get me wrong, none of us should pay money to a school just so we can be preached to. Nor should our efforts be judged unfairly due to an inherent bias. I don't agree with that for one second. But exposing people.. through debate, through lecture, through assignments.. to perspectives they'd snarl their noses at and never give an in depth look at.. is good for you. So shut it.

 

[dr seuss]

i think conservatives are on the whole too stupid and unquestioning to pursue academia.

JOKES!

what i really wanted to say was this: guess who sits on the board of the institution behind CreativeRandom's 'The Shame of America's One-Party Campus' report?

could it be... Richard Perle, over there by the nuts? Is that Lynne Cheney helping herself to another glass of pinot noir? my my, i think i see Newt Gingrich putting a record on. perhaps he'll have a dance with David Frum. Michael Novak looks on fine form!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

 

[ebola?]

>>The simple fact is that you can not study and use sociology if you are going to be a neo-conservative. The neo-liberal, neo-con view of human beings and their relationship to society and the world is just completely incompatible with sociology which emphasises the social construction of knowledge and the subject.>>

Heh...the "right-wingers" of the Berkeley sociology department are left-liberals.

ebola

 

[solistus]

I go to a small liberal arts university in New York; it's hard to imagine a more stereotypically 'liberal' environment than that. The majority (although certainly not all) of my professors who have given any indication of political orientation have been left-leaning, but never have I heard any conservative students complain that this negatively impacted them somehow.

If grading is fair and the politics is on-topic (at least when it takes up significant amounts of class time and certainly if it's in an assignment), I think it's a good thing. I agree with the arguments others have posted regarding university being a place for exposure to new ideas and different sides of the issue. I may be a bit biased on this issue myself as a policy debater, but I strongly encourage everyone who has the opportunity to try writing a paper or two from a different perspective on some issue. It is important to realise that, for most contentious issues, opposing beliefs to one's own can be justified rationally.

Regarding inserting bias into discussions of history et al - this is totally unavoidable. Even if you stick solely to the facts (which would make you a rather mediocre history professor, by the way), there is still bias inserted through decisions such as which material to cover or to spend the most time on. IME, *good* professors will spend some time presenting various viewpoints/schools of thought on the subject matter; in this case, obviously, choosing which schools of thought to represent inserts quite a bit of bias. How arguments are constructed presents bias. In some subjects, the very idea that the material should be presented in terms of rational/logical arguments can be contentious (e.g., postmodern thought in philosophy is often advocated through irony, seemingly illogical arguments, non-textual communication such as art or any number of other forms). However, most professors I've had present a variety of arguments on different issues, even if they personally disagree with some of them. If anything, I've noticed an institutional bias toward views that are somewhat more conservative than my own on many subjects. My Social & Political Theory class, for example, cut Marx from the curriculum at the last minute but spent plenty of time on Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. We touched on Rawls and a few modern leftists; however, 90% of the material focused on 'representative' states and the entire Socialist perspective was absent.

This brings me to another important point. University study is more in tune with international literature, research and thought. Whereas primary education varies dramatically between countries, university education in the West, while it certainly varies between countries, does so to a lesser degree. By international standards, authors like Rawls are not seen as particularly liberal.

One of the great things about university in my experience so far is that intelligent people of many different perspectives are given the opportunity to engage one another in argument and discourse. Don't feel alienated or oppressed by a professor with different opinions than your own; take the opportunity to present your arguments in your papers and (hopefully) receive some feedback from an educated person of an opposing point of view. Also, if you're 100% committed to your current political ideology regardless of solid arguments from other perspectives, university is probably not gonna be your 'thing.' You have to have the self-awareness and maturity to accept that out of all the things you currently believe, there's a good chance something in there is wrong; every time you hear a good argument that contradicts your opinions, you should resolve the conflict until you have either come up with an answer to that argument or realised that your old views were flawed.