Yea I did.Did you just…compliment yourself and promote your own post? Also, note how the study doesn’t list the universities, just that they’re “comprehensive?”
The other study said its list was comprehensive too; a comprehensive list of the Ivy League, Stanford, Smith, and Wellesley.
Yes- which you “countered” by mentioning the “conservative” universities such as Liberty and Ave Maria college. You also forgot UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UW, Emory, etc. In short, most of them.The other study said its list was comprehensive too; a comprehensive list of the Ivy League, Stanford, Smith, and Wellesley
I AM a young person. I’m only 24. I was on a college campus in 2008. Were there people happy that Obama won? Well, duh. There were also people who weren’t happy about it. I remember the day after the election a guy showed up to my history class late. The professor locks the door when class starts and this guy was banging on the door. She opened it and said that class had already started and he was interrupting. The guy said," well my president is black. I don’t need this class." The professor informed him that Obama was everyone’s president and that didn’t mean that her attendance policies had changed.
The study I presented had a good sampling of institutes of higher learning.
I’m just going to assume you didn’t read the thread before making that comment.
Excellent post
Critical thinking of liberals would note that it hasn’t worked well in the real world, because “True Socialism” has just not been tried yet.
Only 6% of academics are Republican? What survey research is this based on? I would think most academics are Independent rather than Democrat or Republican these days. Anyhow, political affiliation rarely comes up in discussion in my Department.
I think the issue though is that sometimes posters make claims and it is perfectly reasonable to ask people to back up those claims. For example, a poster claimed that 6% of college professors were republican and that republicans weren’t hired based on their political views. Now as an academic, the first thing I do when someone makes a claim is to ask them to back it up, which anyone who makes a claim should be able to do. Are you suggesting that people should be able to make claims and not have to back them up?
Of course I saw that post - I just don’t see where you made a convincing case that the laundry list of universities you mentioned are somehow " very conservative". And you still have not addressed my point that the non-leftist schools you mentioned - Ave Maria, Liberty university, etc. are even remotely as influential and significant as the Ivy League schools, MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, etc. And trust me, it doesn’t end with those schools. Have you seen a school newspaper that isn’t leftist?
Exactly. People are making claims and not backing them up, and instead expecting us to refute every claim they make. When they do post studies, they’ve posted one that “studied” the 32 most-liberal private schools in New England and the Pacific NW and extrapolated that to the nation (which would be the equivalent of analyzing the electorate of Starbucks-users in New England and the Pacific NW and saying that the country was overwhelmingly Democrat as a result). Their second study made no reference to which universities they even studied, which is highly suspect. I have yet to see a study with big, conservative Southern universities also represented, which would ACTUALLY be a comprehensive list.
Absolutely. We had a (ridiculously overt) liberal newspaper and a conservative newspaper at my school. We had Christian groups and we had LGBT groups. Etc., etc.
It is perfectly reasonable to ask.
And what of the conservative bias in the media? How much influence does that have on the population? Or is that a very different matter?
Hi Kendra. You still aren’t really getting my point. You’re anecdotes about your own personal experience are great, and I have my own as well. But your anecdotes do little to refute the case that I and others have made that academia is biased toward the left. I took an informal look at a variety of college newspapers and here is what I found:
BBC is not an example of conservative bias in the media, nor is CBC.
I have taken college social sciences courses, and rightly or wrongly, the constant message was that anecdotal information does not give the same kind of reliability as scientifically controlled studies.
There isn’t a conservative bias in the us media. Unless you view NY Times, Wash Post LA times , ABC. NBC. CBS, etc as conservative. ( which they’re not - unless you’re coming from a perspective of the far left where anything not far left is viewed as “conservative”.
Because that is all they have to offer as refutation of the bias in the classroom.
I think part of the problem is what do you mean by “bias in the classroom”. There are studies that show that college professors are much more likely to be liberal than conservative. Now, the question is, how does this translate into the classroom? Is there a tendency to use the classroom as a bully pulpit to push political views? There are some examples of that, otherwise this thread would not exist. But is such behavior pervasive? There is little data on that one way or another.
Those school newspapers may be liberal or have liberal articles, but not all clubs are. I’m sure if you look, you will find conservative articles in college newspapers too. Are you wanting a “conservative” only school? You aren’t going to get it. You also aren’t going to get a “liberal” only school, even those heavily liberal schools will have conservative clubs. I’m perfectly fine with having a diverse campus. The whole world is diverse, better get used to it.
