A recent study found that nearly half of all college students
believe that professors are infusing course curricula with their
own political beliefs.
Nearly one-third of the students attending some of the
nation’s top colleges and universities, including UCLA,
reported that they had to agree with the political views of some
professors in order to get a good grade, and 46 percent believed
that some professors use the classroom to present their personal
political views.
The study was conducted by The American Council of Trustees and
Alumni, a nonprofit academic watchdog organization founded by Lynne
Cheney ““ Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife ““ and
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., among others.
“The students should not be pressured to accept a faculty
member’s views when those views are just value
judgments,” ACTA Senior Consultant Barry Latzer said.
“The faculty value judgments are no better than anyone
else’s.”
The ACTA came under fire in 2001, after releasing a post-Sept.
11, 2001 report that criticized college and university faculty that
failed to “pass on to the next generation the legacy of
freedom and democracy,” according to the organization’s
Web site.
Latzer refutes some ACTA critics that maintain that the
organization is pushing a conservative agenda.
“We’ll leave the characterization of our
organization to others,” Latzer said. “This is an
academic freedom agenda. The study reflects the opinions of
students, not our opinions.”
The results of the study also indicated a liberal slant among
professors. Seventy-four percent of surveyed students reported that
some professors use class time to make positive comments about
liberals and nearly half of those surveyed reported professors
making negative comments about conservatives.
“This doesn’t mean that left-wingers are less fair
in presenting their views than people who lean to the right. It
just means there’s more of them,” said Thomas Schwartz,
a political science professor at UCLA.
The notion of a liberal bias on college and university campuses,
a belief long espoused by the conservative base, is by no stretch a
breakthrough. The ACTA, however, maintains the importance of such a
study due to its substantiative value.
“The advantage of this study is that it provides
empirical-based, scientific evidence to support that there is
inappropriate pressure in the classroom,” Latzer said.
Though the fact that liberal viewpoints are prevalent on college
campuses is widely recognized, Kristina Doan, president of the
Bruin Democrats, believes that concerns of bias against
conservatives in the classroom are unfounded.
“A lot of conservatives do feel uncomfortable with so many
liberal professors and they could be reading into things,”
Doan said, explaining that concerns of bias within the classroom
may be based more in speculation than reality.
Doan also refuted the connection between a student’s
ideology and his subsequent grade, pointing out that rather than
professors, “TAs grade papers, anyways.”
Schwartz, one of the few Republican professors at UCLA, doubts
the importance of the study’s long-term results.
He believes that the political atmosphere at most college and
university campuses is so radically liberal that students ““
while initially enamored with liberal causes ““ are eventually
more likely to be turned off and adopt conservative points of
view.
“Students catch on that they are in a special, funny place
where people act strangely much as they act strangely at
Disneyland,” Schwartz said.
The ACTA will be issuing a report recommending ways of curbing
perceived faculty bias. One of the major recommendations will
entail adding a question about a professor’s bias on student
evaluation forms, Latzer said. Eighty-three percent of the students
surveyed reported that no such question was currently addressed on
such forms.
The study surveyed 658 randomly selected students from the
nation’s top 26 universities and top 25 liberal arts
colleges, as defined by U.S. News & World Report. The ACTA
survey has a four percent margin of error.