Colleges Fail Liberal Students by Not Challenging Their Ideas
This piece from Michael Munger at Minding the Campus is further proof that American academia is too far to the left.
How Colleges Fail Liberal Students
This is an edited version of a talk sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and published Aug. 6 on the Pope Center site. The talk was given on Milton Friedman Day, July 31 in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Too often, American college students face a one-question test, one based not on facts, but on ideology. The test: “Are you a liberal, or conservative?”
The correct answer is, “I’m a liberal, and proud of it.” That concerns me.
However, the nature of my concern may surprise you. I’m not worried much about the students who get it wrong; for the most part, they actually get a pretty good education.
I’m worried about those who get it right. The young people that our educational system is failing are the students on the left. They aren’t being challenged, and don’t learn to think.
Students on the left should sue for breach of contract. We promise to educate them, and then merely pat them on the head for having memorized the “correct” answer!
I was Chair of Political Science at Duke for ten years. At a meeting of department heads, we heard from the chair of one our Departments of Indignation Studies.
We have several departments named “Something-or-Other Studies.” In most cases, they were constituted for the purpose of focusing indignation about the plight of a group that has suffered real and imagined slights and now needs an academic department to be indignant in.
At the meeting, the chair of one of those departments said, “I find that I don’t really need to spend much time with the liberal students, because they already have it right. I spend most of my time arguing with the conservative students. That’s how I spend my time in class.”
This woman was teaching conservative students how to think about arguments and evidence; how to make your arguments in a persuasive way. She was educating them.
Her liberal students? They were given that one-question test. They were just certified as already “knowing what they need to know.”
Comments
Challenging a liberal’s ideas makes them smear the challenger’s character. Can’t expect them to think for themselves after years of academic brainwashing.
We have several departments named “Something-or-Other Studies.” In most cases, they were constituted for the purpose of focusing indignation
I thought they were constituted for the purpose of making some harmless place to park the poor quality Affirmative Action types they had to put on the faculty who weren’t good enough to teach real college-type subjects, like anthropology or engineering or animal husbandry or tensor calculus or Slavic languages.