I have caught this story now twice on World News Now. Some right wing group at UCLA called the Bruin alumni wants students to "out" Professors at UCLA that they consider to be to liberal and or left leaning. Sign of the times I guess. This story just disgusted me.

can you say witchunt???

Well doesn't the ACLU, gay rights groups and other right-leaning groups compile lists of professors who are from the left? There have been a number of left-thinking speakers who have had their scheduled appearances cancelled due to protests from "us" right wing types. So what's good for the goose...

How can such people be "outed" when 99% of the faculty is liberal to begin with?

Gee....you make it sound as if thats a bad thing!! wink

It's horrifying!

Only 1% should be liberals, so we never forget what they act like and who they are. It's kind of like a zoo housing an endangered species exhibit.

I always thought that only 1% should be conservatives

the other 99% fully functional and rational, unlike the conservatives of course

Why, MIB, you're nearly a genius! That is exactly what a university should be...a zoo housing the 1 percent of the endangered species known as right-wing nut jobs! I'm glad to see you agree with the mantra of higher education! Keep those right-wing nut jobs under the thumb of clear-thinking, fair-minded liberals! Hey judge, you are starting to come around after all!

i love, love, love that conservatives always bemoan the fact that american university faculties are liberal-leaning.

do they not realize what they are really saying? let me translate and read between the lines:

america's most intelligent and educated members overwhemingly trend toward liberal politics. that's right all the smart people are liberal! and they say this as if it is BAD thing. i suffer their embarassment for them that they don't realize what the implication is for who supports more conservative politics....

quite frankly, i'm proud that my fellow liberal voters are among our most educated and intelligent, and quietly amused that the political opposition trumpets the fact that they aren't!

Sometimes I wonder how you can post such blather while you're laughing so much when typing. Your posts are nothing if not amusing.

Fair-minded? Liberals are the most intolerant, unaccepting, unfair, and hypocritical people on this planet. They scream about free speech but deny nonliberals their right to speak. They scream about tolerance but deny nonliberals the right to be seen or heard. They...I can go on and on.

Millerbeach, why even engage him? You get overripe comments about "liberals" etc. that are an obvious projection of the sort of person he is and that he admires.

Anyways, back to this East German-style attack on academic freedom, it appears that a former Republican Congressman has joined a noted conservative professor, Stephan Thernstrom, and others, in resigning from the UCLA alumni association based on what one of the professors has termed its "McCarthyite" actions.

US university spying scandal prompts resignations

Just think, people defending spying on professors, warantless wiretapping of American citizens who aren't terrorists, seizure of private records for supposed investigations...it's positively Stalinistic!

One thing that is unclear to me is whether the association simply want liberal professors "outed" or whether it wants them fired.

Professors at most research universities make a lot of their money by being public intellectuals, so increased exposure through such "outings" might ironically assist them. This doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

I'm less disturbed by the outing effort than the underlying expectation by many students that the goal of higher education is to give them a marketable degree without challenging their worldview (and before I get accused of being biased, I include both conservative and liberal students in the bunch). It's becoming less about learning how to think and express oneself and more about getting a bachelors degree for the resume, with professors acting as babysitters/entertainers (assuming students actually show up and do the work).

I'm also not all that concerned by the fact that there's a liberal bias in higher education, since the sheer numbers indicate that more liberal folks seek Ph.Ds and want to become professors. If the pool of candidates has a leftward tilt, it will be reflected in the hires (akin to how the legal profession tilts left or the military tilts right). What are conservatives expecting universities to do? Have affirmative action for conservatives? :confused: Perhaps there is a feedback loop that perpetuates this, but my suspicion is otherwise.

[ January 20, 2006, 08:43 AM: Message edited by: Neptune ]

While approaching the issue of the il-liberality of university leaders and professors might help highlight the inherent political and social bias within higher ed, generating a list of "liberals" or "progressives" or even a short list of "conservative" professors seems ill advised from a PR perspective.

Finding a liberal in a university is as shocking and rare as finding a drunk in bowling alley after 2AM. The problem with the exercise is that making lists or outing liberals is perceived as an act of intolerance, not of information sharing.

Plus, in 25 years, someone collecting that list might be before the Senate as a judicial nominee and Ted Kennedy is going to hold him/her to task for the Joe McCarthy styled tactic employed 25 years ago. Intolerance of liberals is just as wrong as intolerance of conservatives... or the worst, intolerance of those who don't see politics as the all-important subject most of us here do.

I liked having liberal professors in school --they made great debating partners and we put my other classmates to sleep quickly... it was a stealth manuever to close-down the impressionable minds of my classmates and protect them from the evils of liberal indoctrination.

University faculties are taught to think, analyze and research. Not just go along with the conservative dogma that the current administration would like the country to believe.

So what are you saying, thersis? That conservative beliefs are a form of mental illness or diminished capacity? That flap had its heyday about a year ago - and was dismissed as crackpot junk science shortly afterwards.

And what happens when the dogma comes from the left, as it often does on campuses, Sooner? Let the sunshine in on all sides; fully informed is better informed - and better able to decide. Monitoring what and how faculty teach in their classrooms at public universities is not a witchhunt; it's part of ensuring that public funds are not misused - and also goes by the name of "peer review" when it's the profs who are doing the monitoring. As a California taxpayer, I want - and have a right - to know if my taxes are going to espouse causes or ideas I don't support or, more essentially, indulging incompetence in a profession that should be free from it. More power to these monitors, I say: RIGHT ON!

The real question shouldn't be whether a professor is liberal or conservative. It should be whether that comes in to play anywhere. I didn't mind having conservative or liberal professors (and yes, I had both), any more than I would mind having gay or straight or Catholic or Jewish or agnostic ones. If they spent all their time "preaching their gospel", whatever their gospel was, then I'd have a problem. Never did have that problem in college, though.

LXN

Your left-sided dogma is a result of people that have researched and thought logically about a topic. It they way they are trained. They are more fully informed.

Conservative beliefs are a result in people just following what they are told on Sunday so they don't have to think.

[ January 21, 2006, 08:50 PM: Message edited by: Ou Sooner 1997 ]

I couldn't find the original article, but outing liberal professors is ridiculous... just as crazy as if conservative professors were treated the same. Any truly educated person, liberal or conservative, should think so.

Isn't college supposed to be a time where you're exposed to different views and your belief system is challenged a little? I know when I went to college, I was exposed to a whole lot of viewpoints that I had never been before. I'll be the first to admit that my views on many issues are on the liberal side, but on others, my views are a considered conservative. Discussion, debate, and exploring both sides of an issue made my beliefs stronger and prepared me to intelligently express them. Even the most die-hard liberal should consider being exposed to conservative thought a good thing, and vice versa. It's just sad that some people out there are so afraid of other people's views.

Whoever started this thread got the story very, very wrong. The use of your terminology of 'outing' professors is wrong. For a more nonbiased view of what the BAA is doing read the LA Times story.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-uc...mostemailedlink

Anywho, while the BAA's actions are extreme, they do have a point. Professors using the guise of free speech have shown their biases in class and do proselytize their views to unassuming students. I know at my school, certain professors are on extreme sides of the political spectrum and clearly make that known. I for one would appreciate more balanced lectures...after all, a good professor will always show both sides of the story.

I'm a little more than insulted that you guys seem to think after hearing something I can't see it as bullcrap and will automatically be indoctrinated. I have sat through lectures where I outright disagreed with professors, liberal and conservative. I don't need anyone to protect my brain.

Right on Illini, universities are where students are supposed to learn to think for themselves if they havent already begun to do so by then. They should be able to take in the views of all their professors, right and left and everything in between, and decide for themselves what they believe. That is after all the point of a liberal arts education, which is why it is so valuable.

Yeah, it'd be nice for people to be able to be balanced -- but we do bring in our own baggage. Which is why I try to provide readings with multiple interpretations, along with writing assignments in which students are expected to discuss which author does a better job in proving their case. They don't necessarily have to agree with the author who does a better job in making their case, but they need to analyze the arguments (thus, we call it "critical thinking").

But the reason why most faculty have gone on to get Ph.D.'s in their subjects is because they are interested enough and passionate enough about their subjects to want to study them further. For example, for the first few years I taught (history), I found that I couldn't teach the Vietnam War and not be thoroughly pissed by the end of the lecture (at Ike, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon -- presidents from both parties, lest you think I'm simply a partisan hack).

But bottom line, our courses have generic descriptions, and our lectures focus on what we think is important. I don't want to my classes be "World Civ I according to me", but bottom line is that I have to decide what I consider the most important aspects of these courses and deliver it in a way that keeps people (1) thinking; and, just as importantly (2) interested. This means that what I focus on, along with other things like the tone of my voice while I'm speaking and the anecdotes I share are, to use poker language (since it's fashionable) "tells" to my opinions. And yes, my students are able to discern certain opinions from my tone. I think George W. Bush is a twit, and I don't do a very good job of hiding it. I try, but I find tone changing when I talk about him. It's not something I consciously do, but it does happen. And as long as you have people, and not automatons, standing at the front of the room, that's the way it's going to be.

[ January 22, 2006, 05:38 PM: Message edited by: SoFlaSpartan ]

Illini, You make a good point, and no one was insulting your or anyone else's intelligence by their posts here, but the problem arises, as it has in the past, when some of these profs, whatever end of the spectrum they're on, use grades to "discipline" students who don't agree with them and aren't shy, as you indicate you are, about not only thinking their own thoughts but letting others know them as well. Especially at public universities, that's an odious practice, and the UCLAns are right to do something about it, just as the young man at U of Michigan was several years ago, when he was browbeaten by a zealous feminist TA and fought back when she tried to stifle his own freethinking.

Well, that of course is an exception. But this is also why you report instructors like that to the administration. If they don't listen, the media is always happy to do something about it.

However, you are talking about the exception, not the rule when it comes to loudmouth professors.

SFS, Yes, the better academics got their doctorates for the reason you cite, but you must admit that many less scholarly ones did so, during and after Vietnam, simply to avoid the draft without going to Canada or being able to establish CO status, which was perhaps a precursor of their insincerity. Caught up more by the "counterculture of revolt," as it was then called, than by genuine intellectual curiousity, these lesser lights became the storm troopers of the campus wars, and went on to fight the cultural ones, generally aligned on the left. Eventually gaining tenure by sheer staying power - "persistence" assigns them a quality they don't deserve - they came to dominate some faculties as much as they dumbed down the institutions into which they had insinuated themselves. I know: I personally suffered through their shallow classes at three separate institutions and suffered the embarrassment that was lost on them of often knowing more about the subjects they were supposed to teach. In time, they'll be gone, but where they persist, they're a blight on honest academics and freethinkers of all stripes.

there are two UCLA faculty members in this group--I'd love to sit in on their lectures

I'm sure there's no bias in their classroom

<heavy sarcasm>

One of the things you have to understand is that these things operate in cycles. For example, within my own discipline, the school of thought during the 1940s and 1950s was known as the "Consensus School" -- was ultra-patriotic and quite conservative, partly in response to WW2 in the 1940s, partly in response in the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 1950s (think like we do or be fired -- you want a scary example of that, do some research on the Johns Committee at the University of Florida in the '50s).

In the 1960s, it swung the other way, toward more liberal trains of thought -- yes, some scholars sought to avoid service in Vietnam, others truly were offended by the writings of the 1950s.

Evidence is starting to show that among those who came of age during, say, the Reagan administration, when the country took a definite rightward turn, there is an increase in the number of conservative scholars. They tend to be focused within the Colleges of Business, while the Colleges of Social Sciences and Humanities still continue to tilt to the left.

These things, like I said, do operate in cycles. But for people to say "My grade was affected because I disagreed with the radical lesbian feminist," well, I'd like to hear both sides of the story.

I've heard students claim that I graded them down for a variety of reasons (you hate my argument -- you don't like that I'm opposed to _____ -- fill in the blank of whatever social movement they oppose, etc). Of course, they don't admit that they got a graded down because of the stuff I actually write in their papers, like "You write in sentence fragments, use no evidence, and you didn't follow the friggin' instructions."

Nope, that can't be it, now, can it?

SFS, I'm glad you DO count grammar, spelling, syntax and all the other things that too many other profs don't.* We're talking about college degrees here, not just HS diplomas. And I agree with your cyclical interpretation, especially the shift to the B-schools from the social sciences. But that still doesn't excuse those who have been found to grade down for the thoughts expressed, even where the presentation is able. I'm sure we can agree that such people are unfairly pushing their own agenda and ought to be prevented from doing so at their students' expense.
_____
*Ask your students to "parse" a sentence or two and see how many even know what you're talking about!

PS I was a history major too, and hope to teach it at a local CC after I retire to keep my mind alert.

I don't mind agenda pushing. In high level academia, some "pushing" strikes me as inherent to the research process--whether that be "pushing" a certain novel point of view to get hired or become tenured, or "pushing" an idea in the classroom to get students to think about an issue. I'm more concerned by students getting punished by teachers for holding a certain point of view or vice versa (which it looks like the UCLA association is trying to prod the University of California system to do).

During law school I took a class with Lani Guinier. Although some of her ideas were way left (which she freely acknowledged) she also welcomed student criticism of her own ideas. Her lack of ego and commitment to critical thinking was refreshing. During one exchange, a student had the balls to say "Professor Guinier, I think that idea is bullshit," to which she responded "good, now tell me why," which prompted a great classroom discussion. To me, this is the sign of a good educator using "agenda pushing" as a tool.

Actually, I'm surprised no one has posted about the nutcase who started this UCLA group. It turns out that he's been fired from THREE straight jobs, including one with racist David Horowitz, a known nutcase who has gone so far as to label this scoundrel "uncontrollable"! Now when David Horrorowitz is calling you out of control, that is really saying something.

Also, every reputable university--and certainly major, highly ranked Research I universities like UCLA--have procedures in place to address student grievances about professorial conduct. At private universities, they're usually pretty strict, especially the best ones.

Oh,and there's this tidbit:

Maybe one of his prior jobs was running a horse farm too???? eek! wink