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Liberal indoctrination apparently not working
Posted By katie allison granju
From Instapundit, some comments by a self-proclaimed “conservative professor” on a study he’s done on how university faculty attitudes impact students:
The main point of the study is not to dismiss all concerns about the left wing orientation of the faculty. Rather, our goal was simply to assess the impact that faculty ideology has on the political views of the students they teach. We have two main findings:
First, that faculty are significantly farther to the left than the population (I know, the sky is blue, stop the presses!).
The other finding, which is more newsworthy, is that faculty ideology appears to have little impact on student ideology. Speaking for myself as a conservative college professor, I think this second finding is good news. We take pains in the study to emphasize that we are not addressing what goes on in the classroom - that isn’t the nature of the data we used. In fact, we say outright that our findings do not preclude the possibility that faculty members are trying to indoctrinate students but failing miserably at it! Our study looks at one part of the debate and looks at the evidence. We think our approach, which focuses on changes in student orientation, is preferable to “snapshot” studies which look at student ideology at a single point in time. Others will look at this question in a different (and hopefully better) way.
While I think it is good news that students are (apparently) not putty in the hands of their left-leaning professors, there are plenty of other good reasons to be concerned about the lack of intellectual diversity on many college campuses.
Mar 28th, 2008
