Electronic Writer

Right Wing Eye

This is an opinion/editorial republished in full from the Boston Globe.

A left-wing monopoly on campuses

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | December 2, 2004

THE LEFT-WING takeover of American universities is an old story. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with “God and Man at Yale,” which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.

Today campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly minted graduate of another prominent university — Ben Shapiro of UCLA — shows in “Brainwashed,” a recent bestseller. “Under higher education’s facade of objectivity,” Shapiro writes, “lies a grave and overpowering bias” — a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes.

No surprise, then, that when researchers checked the voter registration of humanities and social science instructors at 19 universities, they discovered a whopping political imbalance. The results, published in The American Enterprise in 2002, made it clear that for all the talk of diversity in higher education, ideological diversity in the modern college faculty is mostly nonexistent.

So, for example, at Cornell, of the 172 faculty members whose party affiliation was recorded, 166 were liberal (Democrats or Greens) and six were conservative (Republicans or Libertarians). At Stanford the liberal-conservative ratio was 151-17. At San Diego State it was 80-11. At SUNY Binghamton, 35-1. At UCLA, 141-9. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, 116-5. Reflecting on these gross disparities, The American Enterprise’s editor, Karl Zinsmeister, remarked: “Today’s colleges and universities . . . do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America.”

At about the same time, a poll of Ivy League professors commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that more than 80 percent of those who voted in 2000 had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore while just 9 percent backed Republican George W. Bush. While 64 percent said they were “liberal” or “somewhat liberal,” only 6 percent described themselves as “somewhat conservative’ — and none at all as “conservative.”

And the evidence continues to mount.

The New York Times reports that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.

Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. “Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent,” writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, “deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. … Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition.”

Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors “frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course,” 48 percent said some “presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided,” and 46 percent said that “professors use the classroom to present their personal political views.”

Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students’ right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe — liberals and conservatives alike.

“If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment,” says ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, “there would be an uproar.” That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand — like the one-party conformity it flows from — they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.

Okay, I have been posting for nearly a month, and with absolutely no feedback, comments, etc., it is starting to wear thin. How about pressing the little ol’ “comments” button at the bottom of this post, give me a shout out, and recharge my public-writing batteries.

Round Two

I went back the next day to the same Coffeeshop, and they offer FREE wireless Internet for their customers.

This chicken has found a new coop!

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

An Evening Out

I have been told that we create our own reality. And, I am starting to believe it. Although the coffee shop is not new, it is new to me. The scene is really good. Weather Report is playing in the main room. The coffee is strong. The are copies of poetry-related things and glass bricks. It is cool. In fact, the scene is pretty nice.

The feeling here is academic and open-minded. People are arguing about the value of religion in our world, among people finishing their next paper. It is a great scene

Independent coffeeshops have an inherent disingenuousness that makes them really attractive. While Starbucks has been stone-washed and sterilized into conformity–the very element that makes them a successful business, indie-coffee houses can display graffiti on the walls as art, publicize local art shows, and play alternative (and even offensive) music.

I have found Independent coffee houses to be moody–closer to the human spirit than any other establishment. You know when your favorite barrista is working, and the lattes are just better. While the coffee is consistent in the Other, the workers are faceless and nameless and may express themselves in subtle and corporate-approved forms.

It is sort of the prozac of the industry. The Other gets to be a nice and steady establishment–slightly better than normal. On the other hand, the Independent Coffee shops are like real people. Real moody people. They complain, and kick, and scream, and they are have good days, and bad days. They are, in short human, and it is the inconsistency that makes them interesting.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

I just lost a really big post–it was my error, and there is no way to recover. Will update later.

So sad. Lesson learned.

Anybody notice how I put the %-sign before the numbers kinda like the $-sign in that last post. If that ain’t a Freudian slip, I don’t know what is . . . .

After thinking about this during the first half of my work day, I had a few new ideas about this whole election.

I have always said that a racist who says that they are a racist is better than a racist who pretends to be something else. At least they are telling a truth. (Racism just plain sucks, if you ask me, but it does exist in this country and elsewhere.) I touched on this in my last post (or my first–I guess it depends if your glass is half-full or half-empty).

The message that the United States has sent on a global scale is very clear: we are happy to have our position of world bully, we are happy to suppress minorities and dissonance within our own country. Logically, it follows that we treat our own BETTER than we are going to treat another coutry. So, if we are willing to suppress this in our own country–the dissonant voices around the globe better be quiet for awhile. There are going to be conditional strings on everything from here-on-out. At least we are out-of-the-closet with our skeletons. America is struggling as it loses status of “land of the free.” We may be the home of the brave, but we also house a good deal of closed minds (and more of them voted that Liberals–captiol “L”).

The really fantastic and accidental consequence is that we have mobilized the largest force of Free-thinking, progressive people in the history of the United States. If you were to count out exactly %49.99999 percent of the total number of votes–you will know the full scale of our army! We must keep mobilized. Keep the thinkers thinking. Keep the activists activating. And, keep the conservatives on-the-run.

I, for one, am going to maintain the thumb-screws on all of the closed-minded drones quoting Rush Limbaugh as a “humorous–you don’t really listen to him for news” guy, but who tune their radios in at the appropriate times every day regardless.