Liberal Faculty Can Teach With Integrity
By Tony Barboza
Opinions Staff Writer

If you’re in college, you’re most likely being indoctrinated by a force of closed-minded liberals, according to some commentators on a recent study at Cornell University.

The study looked at professors at twenty universities nationwide and found a largely prevalent political allegiance to the left. Described in September’s American Enterprise, the study used local voter registration records to determine the political affiliation of each university’s faculty, defining Democrats or Greens as members of a party of the “left” and Republicans or Libertarians as being on the “right.” The results showed that, typically, less than 10% of college faculty is affiliated with a conservative political party. For example, only 6% of the faculty at UCLA is registered with a right-wing party; only 5% at Brown, 4% at Harvard, and 1% at UC Santa Barbara.

The press’ treatment of these statistics was mostly uniform and reactionary. John Leo of U.S. News and World Report claimed, “Freshman orientation and freshman writing classes are often straightforward exercises in political conditioning.” Walter Williams of George Mason University regarded the inclusion of alternative cultural or historical viewpoints into the classroom as part of professors’ “multiculturalism agenda to propagandize students.

Clearly, this leftist trend in academia is nothing new. Some have tried to explain the imbalance by observing that conservatives often pursue careers in business and finance, leaving the “do-good” liberals to the realm of scholarship and education. Others go further, saying the numbers are evidence of active “ideological discrimination” against conservatives within the educational system. But could it instead be that the base from which universities are hiring professors is a primarily liberal one in the first place? The recent alarm generated by this study is problematic in that it misinterprets what it means to be a good teacher. Political affiliation of professors should be inconsequential, because good teachers don’t make personal biases an academic issue.

They present students with the various tenable viewpoints, leaving the individual to decide which is most valid. They are, after all, hired for the talents and resources they will bring to the campus, not any liberal scheme they may want to pursue.

Those who would emphasize professors’ power in changing the political views of students underestimate the individuality of the learning process and misunderstand the nature of education in the first place. This view discounts the students who, at least at this college, are not blank slates waiting to absorb the professors’ beliefs as pure fact. The very goal of a liberal arts education is to promote quite the opposite way of thinking, one in which students learn to consider varied arguments and draw their own conclusions.

College professors may or may not be “ideologically homogenous,” but one point on which they do likely agree is in the hope that their students will examine and learn about ideas in order to form their own beliefs, rather than passively absorb the ideologies of their professors. In view of that goal, professorial politics seem irrelevant.