Many professors think it is their civic duty to thrust the day’s issues on their students in an effort to make them better, wiser human beings. The inequities of gender discrimination, the plight of the poor and minorities, our neglect of the environment ““ all are fodder for classroom discussion, albeit usually invisible in syllabuses.
In a day and age when society puts great pressure on civic responsibility ““ “love thy neighbor” and respect different beliefs ““ the academic world has become woefully intolerant. Schools themselves have become ramparts of ideological and political insularity that are very difficult for even the most conscientious student to escape or see through.
The problem starts with the professors themselves. Many have forgotten what it means to teach in the first place. The goal of an education (and indeed, the reason we pay for it) is to acquaint the student with the historical background behind an issue and to harness him with the analytical skills he needs to confront that issue.
This idea has been turned on its head. Teachers have taken the place of psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and politicians ““ becoming, essentially, everything that should not be part of a place of learning and indeed, everything that is extrinsic to it.
Today’s teachers saddle their students with all their views about how they think things should be. By choosing what classes to teach and then, selectively choosing the reading material for those classes (not to mention recommending fellow faculty) teachers can effectively sequester students in a narrow world of ideas, one that’s consistent with their own vision.
Students who look on their professors as intellectual demigods, in turn, assume that what they hear in class is the one and only truth ““ the end-all and be-all. When they graduate, they enter the world with a distorted conception of reality.
Universities are hardly representative of the “real world.” That college campuses are unabashedly liberal is a fact that’s been widely accepted for a long time. But it is becoming more pronounced. Today, many universities (I will not venture to say our own.) have a ratio of Democrats to Republican professors as high as 30:1 in some departments and even higher university-wide. The same imbalance is seen with university presidents.
When students are exposed to such an environment, it naturally rubs off. As a result, campuses are becoming monolithic even when diversity is one of their highest priorities.
Predictably, the proportion of people aged 18-24 that voted for a Democrat in the past few national elections far outweighed the proportion of the general population that supported the Democratic candidate.
To be fair, this problem is not always something a university can prevent. Certain policies make bad (or biased) professors a painful fact of life. Tenure, for example, makes it nearly impossible for a university to get rid of unwieldy faculty even if it’s in the university’s best interest.
Hence, there is a heavy burden on the anomalous conservative student to avoid falling sway to the intellectual “culture” at a university. One could imagine someone deciding not to pursue a research contract with a professor for political reasons.
An even more dangerous consequence of this is that the student enters into the world wholly unprepared to deal with basic problems. When a student is only exposed to a narrow range of ideas, he loses the ability to analyze and evaluate alternative points of view, which is central to the concept of a liberal education.
When a political or politically motivated issue enters the classroom (and at times, it is unavoidable), the professor should introduce it as a topic of debate, rather than a tool for his or her self-preservation. In other words, emphasis should not be on “sculpting children’s minds,” but rather, on teaching us how to reasonably decide for ourselves.
I am particularly frustrated when professors avoid teaching by conducting class in a “go around the table” kind of way, where each student is asked to give his or her perspective on a partisan issue. I have suffered many instances when I was asked to give my opinion ““ say, on whether I thought U.S. environmental policy has been fair to whomever. That exercise may be convenient for professors, but it’s futile for students, who are ill-equipped to make those kinds of judgments. More importantly, we’re not supposed to be deciding ethical issues. Rather, we’re there to learn how to go about analyzing the arguments others have made.
In all, students need to be suspicious about whether their professors are self-serving and whether they are getting the full value of their education. That means actively studying syllabuses, textbook lists, and anything that might lend insight into a professor’s agenda.
When the goal is getting a well-rounded education, we cannot afford to be taken for fools.
E-mail Pherson at apherson@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.