Academia Has a Left Wing Problem
In her new column at Bloomberg, Megan McArdle examines the left wing bias of colleges and universities.
Academics Are So Lefty They Don’t Even See It
Consider this recent account of a graduate admissions committee meeting. An applicant to a linguistics Ph.D. program is a matriculating senior at a small historically black college unknown to some committee members. “Left-wing black nationalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “the academic arm of Black Lives Matter.”
The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant’s GRE scores and background — high GRE scores, high-poverty urban school district — than it did with some other candidates. The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and asked, to laughter from committee members, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?”
Other committee members defended her, but didn’t challenge the assumptions about the historically black college or the people who attend it. One noted that the college had a good reputation in the humanities. And another said that her personal statement indicated intellectual independence from her college and good critical thinking. She was eventually passed on to the second round but rejected there, and given the comments of the earlier reviewers, it’s reasonable to think that in that second round, her background probably counted against her.
This is beyond outrageous.
Comments
Not a surprise for 2 reasons. Left wingers flock together because they can’t survive in the real world because competition would cause them to fall behind and because they can’t stand to be challenged in any way by those with differing or better fact based opinions. So they group together protected by their unions and tenure while the rest of the outside world deals with true reality. Eventually, there will be an alternative way for students to get educated without all the liberal baggage which contaminates that learning.