Liberal Faculty at Universities

There is a growing chorus of conservative students complaining that their views and religious leanings are being ignored, looked down upon, or outright ridiculed by a majority liberal leaning faculty at Public Universities around the country. In one state, Ohio I believe, they are trying to pass legislation that would force faculty to be inclusive of conservative’s point of view in the classroom. How do you feel about these student's situation?

 

I am a member of the NAU College Republicans, and what we're doing is setting up a Professor Watch List to let students know which professors around the state spout off political viewpoints (whether liberal or conservative) instead of unbiased-ly teaching (as much as can be expected - you'll never fully get bias out of anything).

~AJ

 

Teachers are disgustingly biased here at penn state. I don't think teachers should have to consider anyone's political views, I simply think that politics are better left outside the classroom. I got a bad grade on a global warming paper (A quality), and I even interviewed the HEAD of the meteorology deparment at MIT, but because my teacher didn't agree, she claimed my paper was poorly supported. I dropped the class, and took it again with a new teacher, turned in the same paper, and was told it was the best paper ever submitted to him in 12 years of teaching. That ****ing bull**** shouldn't stand in our schools. In retrospect, I should have complained to the dean, or the department head.

 

I am greatly disappointed with the people running the colleges for the last 25 years of so. The University is suppose to be a collection of varying viewpoints and theories that come together to debate inorder to foster mental growth and perhaps even find some answers. The left wing bias on the university campus today is no better then the closed mindness of the dark ages of Europe where it was accept the status quo or die. (Thank goodness that professor who falsely claimed to be a native american out in Colorado didn't have that type of power). College is suppose to be about views from the left and views from the right with the professor teaching and asking the student only to present their views in a logical form with support be it physical science or social science. Instead we seem to have people with agenda's and that is not free thought.
Good thread Moen

 

Case in point, an example of the eventual outcome of todays education:

by Edwin A. Locke, Phd & Dean of U of Maryland, Education

Modern Education, It Makes Us Unfit To Live

Andy Brown, the third generation in a family of pilots, was excited. This was his first test in a flight simulator in which he was to be copilot of a commercial airliner. He felt good about himself, because unlike his father and grandfather, he had gone to schools which had practiced the most modern principles of education.

The simulated takeoff from Chicago was routine until the simulated chief pilot suddenly "died" of a heart attack. Andy immediately called the nearest flight center, and they advised him to return to Chicago rather than proceed to Denver, the planned destination. Andy thought about it for a minute and then became angry. Who were they to tell him what to do? He had been taught since the first grade to defy any authority figures, including his parents, who tried to "limit" his freedom of expression. He decided to keep going.

He proceeded to plot the course to Denver, but he was forced to do it by hand, because the computer had a simulated malfunction. At this point he started to feel a little uneasy; he had been educated with "fuzzy math," which gave full credit for wrong answers if you seemed to have followed the "right method." Computation, of course was passé, but he tried to figure it out "approximately." He did not worry about exactitude, because every teacher he had ever had in school and college had assured him that "you cannot be certain of anything."

Soon the plane entered a simulated storm system, and Andy was now forced to fly solely by instruments. This was getting difficult, and Andy started to feel resentment. After all, in school he had never been held to absolute standards. If he failed a test, he was always allowed to take it over until he got a good grade. This was so that his self-esteem would not be threatened. He looked down at his instruments but started to feel confused.

One of the instruments was labeled "attitude" and another "altitude." He always had trouble distinguishing similar words, because he had been trained to read by the whole word method rather than by phonics. The teachers were happy if he got the "general idea" of what a word was. Spelling, of course, was also passé.

At this point Andy felt the need for reassurance. He had always worked in groups at school. In many courses, groups even took the exams as a unit. He had never been held individually responsible for anything. If there was a problem, it was someone else's job to fix it. But there was no one in the plane to consult--only 250 simulated passengers whose "lives" depended on his skill and judgment.

In desperation Andy called a control center, but simulated static from the storm made a good connection impossible. He pulled out the flight manuals for help, but they were very long and looked terribly complicated. He had not really studied them as he was supposed to. In school, he never had to actually read a textbook. Class periods and exams often consisted of the students expressing their feelings about the teachers' feelings about the material. Besides, some of the words in the manuals were long, and he had not seen them before.

Andy's carefully cultivated illusion of "self-esteem"--based on a lifetime of having met no standards, having acquired no knowledge, and having answered no questions requiring an objectively correct answer--began to crumble when confronted by an inexorable--even if simulated--reality that could not be faked. The realization slowly hit him that his self-esteem was a sham and that, in fact, he was unfit to function in the real world. Tears began to stream down his face, and he was still crying 10 minutes later when the plane "crashed" into a mountain peak--100 miles south of Denver.

Andy had "mastered" the core principles of modern education too well. His father and grandfather had been educated the old-fashioned way. They respected their teachers, because their teachers taught them something: they taught them to read using phonics; they taught them facts and how to think using facts. The teachers had standards (including the use of proper spelling, grammar and punctuation), and the students had to meet these standards. There was a right answer to every math problem, and you had better figure it out--on your own, and you had better be sure, and it didn't matter how you felt.

No, this is not a true story and Andy would not get a job with the airlines--today. But our society is rapidly being populated with Andy Browns. The modern educators' chickens are coming home to roost. If they become dominant in our society it will perish just like Andy's 250 simulated passengers--only the crash this time will be real.

Does any of this sound familiar?

 

What? Liberals in the academic world? When did that happen?????

Rather than "complain bitterly when your views are ridiculed by someone you don't respect anyways, because they think differently than you," I'd prefer to raise my kids to "accept public expressions of closed-mindedness with grace and serenity," because the first sign of a successful belief system is the security of the belief. If you're comfortable in your skin, you don't feel someone needling it.

The second sign of a successful belief system is the ability to be exposed to conflicting views without attacking them.

 

But AJ, how can a Republican group be considered an unbiased judge of such a monitoring program? Shouldn't that project be taken up by people without chosen political points of view?

I'm just saying, if I got information about teachers who spout political opinions, and it came from the College Republicans - I'd doubt their objectivity.

 

I understand what Old Dan is trying to get at but I can not completely agree. Taken to the extreme presented in Dan story I would be furious about the lackadaisical standards and incompetence of my professors, however that story is so far from what I experienced during my time in school that I find it hard to agree at all.

If anything, in my classes, I was relieved when a teacher allowed us to work together. Not because we were allowed to cheat or take the tests together but because as a Civil Engineering student the math required for the core classes was very overwhelming. By working in groups we were able to assist the other students with the areas they were fuzzy with and receive assistance with the areas we didn’t understand. We were also less likely to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems we were working on.

Some of the homework problems in the upper classes involved problems that would take 6+ hours to solve, even if you knew what was going on. Yes it is more important to understand the process than to get the right answer. Why? Because if you can’t understand the process than why try to get an answer since it will always be wrong. Also, since education budgets are always being cut the system is consistently faced with limits on their time and money. They are teaching more information in less time than ever before. When a situation like this is created guess what always happens. Quality goes down.

If I was going to complain about any of my professors, and I often do, my very first complaint is that very few actually knew how to teach. Yes a doctoral degree means you know a lot about the subject but it does not mean that you can effectively communicate what you know. All professors should be required to learn how to communicate and they should be monitored in that regard.

The other complaint would be that most of the foreign instructors, and there are a lot in the science disciplines, can barely speak English. Now I do not care if they have an accent but if they are having trouble choosing the correct words and determining how they want to say something they are always absolutely horrible at answering questions. Since they can even communicate their thoughts, how in the H**l can they understand yours. Foreign instructors should be required to take English proficiency exams. And as with the communication exams their proficiency should be monitored from semester to semester.

I know this doesn’t sound so bad but remember if the majority of the students in a class test lower than expected the teacher is not corrected the curve is. It is for this very reason that I am not nearly as proud of my degree as I should be. In fact I feel that I have partially wasted your taxpayer money. Yes I attended on your dime. So understand this, it's not just my problem but yours as well.


I would much rather have instructors I can communicate with telling me crap that I know I can agree, or disagree with than an incompetent foreigner telling me crap that I can’t even understand. Heck dealing with politically maladjusted professors can, and will, provide the student with the necessary tools required to deal with the rest of society’s maladjusted coffee shop politicians. Everybody should learn how to detect a load of crap before they have to live with the consequences of accepting that crap instead of thinking about the subject on their own.

 

Who would you suggest rick? Maybe it would be Sam Donalson of CBS news, or ...well any way, you get the idea don't you.

 

I get the idea - I'm just saying that if I received information like that from a group called NAU College Republicans, I wouldn't believe it. My first reaction would be 'how much of a slide did the Republican teachers get?'

Why not just admit your bias, and produce information that people would believe. Because, on the other hand, if I received information from such a group that says 'Teachers who teach with a liberal slant', I would see that they are trying to make a point, and I would read their facts - they're biased, they know they're biased, and they are producing biased documentation that might interest me, so I wouldn't worry about what they 'aren't telling me'. Let the NAU College Democrats worry about producing information from their perspective...

 

After reading your post and re-reading mine, I left out a key piece of information that would have made your comment invalid: the College Republicans are working with the Young Democrats on this project.

 

If you are taking classes like say anthropology you are certain to get bias since the whole science is based on cultural neutrality. That means that they will not have a flag waving nationalist tone (many ditto heads believe that if Lee Greenwood's Proud to Be an American is not played at the start and end of every class it is bias). If you are taking a math class you won't run into any conservative liberal issues at all. If you are in a class like women's literature you really should expect some fem perspective. You may get a right wing perspective from a military history class or ROTC. You should be able to take a look at the class name and get an idea of the bias.

 

Good debate, carry on...

 

I agree with this statement. Don't expect to go to a women's literature class & get a spiel about how there's no glass ceiling for women in the workplace.

Another thing - I don't know if it's inferred in the original post, but creationism & intelligent design are not science, and do not belong in a science class. Religion & philosophy classes, yes, but not science. There's nothing political about it.

 

anthropology- can't take those boneheads seriously until they state that their entire fossil record is off since humans for the longest of times have settled near the oceans and to some extent rivers and most of that then land is now under water and therefore is our historical record.

Why can't a professor just report the facts and then differencial viewpoints of those facts and be objective with how a student presents their work based upon a viewpoint that is logical and has supporting data? This whole left wing/right wing thing is anti-thought. Then again most dictators are either extreme left or right aren't they!

 

The whole basis of anthropology is objectivity (it is called cultural relativism as opposed to ethnocentricism). The problem arises when an ethnocentric student mistakes objectivity for bias. We are so emerged in our own culture that an objective view appears bias.

 

As expressed on a very popular web site featuring education in our Public Schools.

Look around you at some of the people here on this forum and the way they respond to any thing they don't like. It's not hard to believe all this has some merit for the reason given.

 

I love your source Dan.

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Family/Parents Corner/psychiatry_harms_children.htm

No bias here: www.jesus-is-savior.com/

 

Yes, I know Ahab, any thing you don't happen to agree with has a bias. So what, it's a point of view and IF this topic is to be debated than aren't all points of view acceptable? Or are we supposed to run them by Old shake and bake himsself for approval?

 

I have an 'approved' stamp, if that will help.

please submit everything with the yellow and goldenrod copy still attached. Keep the powder blue copy for your records. If you don't get a response within 6 to 8 weeks, please file a non-response inquiry affidavit. This time keep the green copy, and route the second yellow copy to human resources. The pink copy and the white copy should be routed to the administration offices.

If at that point, you don't get a response.... resubmit your original form.