From Heterox Academy:
and… it’s a website that pushes conservative agendas and vilifies the northeast and the west coast. As you’d expect, it loves the south and Texas.
Typical comments:
“When I was looking at schools with my daughter six or seven years ago I was dreading sending her off to be brainwashed by the PC lefties.”
“I’m not convinced that diversity is a positive value”
I need a shower after reading some of that stuff. Be forewarned.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/profile/discussions/100374326/Zinhead patterns, patterns
Your description lead me to read through many of the (56 or so) responses to the linked post. They seem reasonable, though conservative.
More typical comments:
And on loving Texas…
This is no less or more opinionated that what you’ll fine here in CC.
CC needs an “unhelpful” button.
That’s a bizarre conclusion. The article linked was published by a professor at Claremont McKenna which, last I checked, was located on the West Coast. The authors base the article on a working paper written by a Harvard professor and George Mason professor that investigated the social and political view of American professors. The base article is as linked follows:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147.6141&rep=rep1&type=pdf
There is alot of interesting of data in the working paper concerning voting patterns by specialty, but one of the conclusions was that professors overwhelming self-identify as Liberal vs Conservative (62.2 percent compared to 19.7 percent).
The article starts with this working paper, then investigates the number of identifiable conservatives in the humanities (economics, political science, sociology, history, philosophy, and literature) faculty at select universities. It finds that a vast number of schools have no or very few identifiable conservatives. This includes schools like Yale, Columbia, Brown, while it finds pockets of schools with significant amounts of conservatives (Texas, Uva, CMC). It says nice things about Harvard, which, I believe, is located in the Northeast. It also mentions Catholic Universities like Notre Dame University, Catholic University, and Boston College tend to have diverse faculty, and at least one of these schools is located in the Northeast.
I apologize if the website violated your safe place. Reading things you do not agree with can be so stressful.
Just like going to college violates the safe place of so many conservative students. Oh, dear.
I majored in Classics. I have no idea about the political leanings of my professors, nor would it have made an ounce of difference in the education I received. It was a very liberal campus (Brown in the 1970’s) and I had friends who were rock solid, staunch conservatives, friends who thought they were anarchists, friends who were dyed in the wool liberal democrats, and everything in between. Plus friends from overseas who often held bizarre political ideas-- thought the press should be censored, thought that America needed a “State Religion” but loved the personal freedom that they themselves enjoyed once they got here- especially those who were gay and would have been stoned to death in their country of origin.
I’m not clear on who exactly cares about the political leanings of the faculty except for people who should probably be keeping their kids home getting a degree from U of Phoenix. Two of my kids majored in political science, one at a college with a pretty conservative reputation, the other a pretty liberal one, I can’t say it mattered at all. When you are crunching 100 years of data and comparing Congressional representation in rural counties of less populous states to urban counties of more populous states and how populations have shifted over time, does the political leanings of the professor who taught you to code make a difference? Professors don’t get paid to shill for their personal causes- they get paid to teach.
So not getting this argument. Maybe my Latin poetry professor was a Marxist? Maybe my Art and Antiquities professor was a supporter of the Viet Nam war??? (I was not).
How did this impact me in any way???
I must have missed all the student protests led by conservative students demanding “safe spaces” free from political and social opinions that violate their delicate sensibilities. “Oh dear” indeed.
Also, just because a Prof is of one political persuasion doesn’t necessarily mean he/she will favor those who hold similar/same views when it comes to grading or harsh comments.
I reveled in being contrarian with my Profs…a behavior which factored into my abysmal HS GPA but actually factored into my getting high grades and highly supportive comments from Profs…even though they strongly disagreed with my espoused positions.
In contrast, many classmates whose politics/expressed views were the same/similar to those very same Profs ended up getting marked down or called out in class because the Profs felt they weren’t making good arguments or were giving short shrift to the opposing perspectives…including conservative ones.
Another case is an older college classmate who ended up being warned he was on the edge of being tossed out of grad school because of the manner in which he argued a point the Prof strongly agreed with and felt was correct. However, she felt the manner in which he expressed his arguments violated the university’s policy on civility in interacting with classmates and other members of the university community. She warned him a repeat will result in his being tossed out despite the fact his politics/beliefs accorded largely with her’s.
Why? If a post violates the terms of service, you can flag it, and if you think the poster is wrong, you can post your own comment explaining why. Unless, of course, you don’t want to be bothered with forming a cogent counterargument and just want to register your disapproval of an opposing viewpoint - sort of the online equivalent of booing. But why stop there? Maybe you can convince CC to automatically hide or remove posts with an excessive number of down votes. Because let’s be honest, that’s what you really want - the heckler’s veto.
There is a huge amount of whining among conservatives about how liberal most colleges are. Don’t act like you all aren’t cry babies about it, because you are.
Apparently they simply avoid the colleges altogether. That’s a pretty safe space, I’d say.
Do you think most colleges aren’t liberal, intparent?
I’ll wager that most fire fighters are conservative- or that at least a not insignificant majority are conservative. I’ll bet you that most psychiatrists are liberal and that most bank examiners for the OCC are conservative. Most doctors believe in having “end of life” discussions/palliative care only and most Catholic priests do not.
But what does this tell you about the quality of fire fighting and prevention in any given city (likely nothing) or the quality of psychiatric care in a particular hospital (likely nothing). If you are a liberal, are you going to worry about your bank failing tomorrow?
All sorts of occupations attract people with a certain mind-set, way of thinking, political or artistic sensibility, etc. This is life. Are you going to pick a physician based on politics, or find someone who accepts your insurance and is skilled at treating the ailment you have?
“Arguing” vs. “discussing” are two different things. It is abundantly clear that over and over tenure-track professors will not get tenure if they argue. They need to fit in. It’s like a fraternity, one vote can blackball someone, and if you don’t agree with topics even outside of your field, but controversial, you will be out. As long as it is before you get full tenure. Once you get full tenure, there has to be proof that you are acting against the university specifically.
As for a “safe space”, asking for a safe space is asking for segregation. The sign on the door reads:
“KEEP YOUR OPINIONS TO YOURSELF IF THEY DON’T AGREE WITH MINE” It’s not just segregation by race, but by opinion.
I think you’re right Blossom.
On campus, I think it actually harms liberal students and faculty more to not be exposed to different points of view. Conservative kids on campus, I think, generally gain from the experience - I think it’s very rare that grades would be impacted.
Yes, I think most colleges are liberal. I think it is hard to think deeply and pay attention to the world today and not be liberal. Hence the bias on college campuses.
Keep telling yourself that!
In a few discussions I’ve read online and among friends involved in or otherwise having interests in higher ed, the consensus seems to be that fewer conservatives prefer to enter academia because the financial remuneration vs required education/time/effort needed to enter the profession is so low only a minority of them feels it’s worth it. And most of those tend to gravitate towards the perceived less liberal fields such as engineering*/STEM or Economics and to some extent some areas of Politics/Poli-Sci.
This consensus was confirmed even by many conservative friends and/or HS classmates who otherwise had the undergrad GPAs/stats to enter PhD programs in their academic fields of interest. Most of them admitted they’d prefer to expend their efforts into landing a highest paying/status job such as ones on wall street/ibanks and then pursue an MBA…especially at places like HBS, Wharton, Columbia, NYU-Stern, etc etc and aspire to senior executive/CEO positions in wall street/ibanks/finance firm or with a fortune 500 company.
Likewise, you won’t see nearly as many genuinely radical lefty activisty students like the ones at my LAC flocking to join wall street firms or ibanks or pursue MBAs as they’d feel that’s selling out their own personal values too much.
- This amuses me to some extent as most engineering/CS graduates I know and work with are just as likely to be radical lefty progressives with an activisty bent as conservative. In fact...the ones I know and worked with tend to be polarized to the extremes...either staunchly libertarian-right or staunchly radical lefty progressives who'd almost feel at home at Oberlin during the time I attended.
Made for many interesting and sometimes overly heated lunchtime political discussions outside the office…and I’m often called in to act as the moderator as compared to them…my views are considered quite middle of the road and they liked the fact I minored in politics.