Daniel, you should read your resources more carefully. Overall, your
article primarily focused on schools in New York, California, or the Ivy
League schools, where left of center bias is expected. There was some
sparse mention in two articles of schools outside these categories, but
with the exception of a single article purely anecdotal evidence was
used to make a point about the environment of colleges and universities
across the US. All articles diregarded small private colleges and
universities, and community colleges, for the purposes of gaining
anecdotal evidence or for the purpose of mining them for statistics.
The one study that seemed the most rigorous may have ignored business
departments and the hard sciences completely, probably knowing it would
skew their numbers.
More responses below.
Jim
**********
Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE wrote:
>Here you are John, of course I can believe what I want regardless of its oll
>korrect status with you, popularity is not the issue its integrity.
>
>http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20030121-9999_1n21edbias.html
>
It's interesting that you discount John's anecdotal responses when so
much of this article is anecdotal. However (and I think you should
notice some bias in reporting here, btw), the article did give us a bit
more. Namely, this paragraph:
"Last year, the institute polled more than 32,000 full-time
undergraduate professors and found that 48 percent identified themselves
as "liberal" or "far left," compared with 18 percent who described
themselves as "conservative" or "far right.""
The bias in reporting is revealed by the way the statistics are
handled. They could have reported that 52% of college faculty refused
to identify themselves as "liberal" or "far left," leaving the
impression that a slim majority of college professors are -not-
liberal. I assume the 34% of faculty not accounted for by these numbers
were either moderate or didn't feel the categories offered applied to
them.
It's probably fair to say there are more profs left of center than right
of center in the humanities across the boards, but people in the
sciences tend to lean to the right (from my experience). You need to
realize there are many, many professors in community colleges, private
colleges (including religious schools), etc. that are subject to
pressures very different from profs. at large state colleges and the
Ivys. These are completely different environments. What I think you'd
really see are some schools that are very much to the left and some
schools more leaning to the right.
***********
>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/08/13/ED30977.DTL
>
This article is completely anecdotal. I will say that college and
universities are indeed dealing with some legal issues when dealing with
"pc" speech; namely, trying to set policies in place that will help them
avoid lawsuits. I won't say there's no ideological basis for this
either, but I am saying the reference to legalities isn't completely
illegitimate.
I've heard, firsthand, from a rightish, born again Christian humanities
student at UC Berkeley that the environment there was conducive to free
expression. She didn't feel restricted at all during her attendance in
the mid 90s.
The most important thing to notice about the above article, though, is
that the writer "reasons" from an account at UC Berkeley to statements
about all academia. Note the title. It's not "Berkeley's swindle."
**************
>http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/articles/1038.html
>
Notice the qualification in this next article:
> Horowitz commissioned a poll that found that more than 90 percent of
> professors who taught arts and sciences in elite universities vote
> Democrat.
"Elite" universities, not "all" universities. Notice also this
observation about the study:
> The study of professors left out the business and other professional
> schools, which are central parts of the university, and focused on
> elite institutions.
Which isn't too different from what John O. said in an earlier post.
***************
>http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~alm/alm/articles/academicbias.htm
>
This is an anecdotal report on the environment of a single university.
I think you should pay attention to national political demographics,
though -- big cities tend to vote Democrat, and I'd bet any amount of
money any big city in New York state did. It's not too big a stretch,
then, that at least some university departments in these big cities
reflect area demographics.
Funny, there aren't too many stories about left wing bias at the
University of Oklahoma.
***********
>http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2002/february_2002_2.html
>
Oh, look at that -- they're only looking at the Ivys again:
> A new poll of professors at Ivy League universities has found an
> alarming disparity between the numbers of liberal and conservative
> faculty on the campuses.
**********
>http://www.academia.org/news/against_grain.php
>
Let's see -- the state of California goes Democrat most of the time, so
it's surprising that college environments are left of center? So far
we've hit the state of New York and the state of California exclusively,
haven't we? What does that tell you, really, about the national
university environment?
> When the administration at California Polytechnic State University
> dropped its efforts to discipline rising sophomore Steve Hinkle for
> posting a flier on a college-approved event after a lengthy campaign,
> the school's action did not surprise Hinkle's faculty advisor. "I've
> seen them do this before," Cal Poly psychologist Dr. Laura Freberg says.
***********
>http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2002/october_2002_5.html
>
This one actually goes a way toward making your point, and I like the
way it conducted its research, but it still focuses primarily on Ivy
league schools or CA schools. It gets kudos for talking about two
schools outside these categories: Houston and Colorado. It seems to have
stuck with major state universities and the Ivys, though, ignoring small
regional liberal arts colleges, community colleges, etc., which I think
would have changed the look of things a bit.
It's interesting to see that their description of the departments polled
excluded business schools and hard science departments from their research:
> The professors were categorized by their academic departments, such as
> political science, economics, journalism, English, history, and sociology
The sentence leaves the question open. It's possible business
departments and hard science departments were included. But it's
possible they were left out.
I suspect they were left out. I'd really like to see the hard data on
this one. It looks interesting.
**********
>http://www.frontpagemag.org/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=4993
>
Don't really know what to do with this one, since it's just a guy
repeating your position in an interview.
***********
>http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=\Culture\archive\200201\CUL20020
>103b.html
>
This article uses anedoctal evidence provided by a few reports to make a
statement about all colleges and universities in the US.
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Received on Mon Sep 29 15:58:52 2003
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