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January 14, 2005
Conservative Students
There are several interesting articles about academic life today. The first of these is a long article from City Journal about the rise of conservatism among college students. These students often have to hide their beliefs in class to avoid being threatened by professors or to avoid getting bad grades. Some university administrators even encourage the burning of conservative student newspapers and use student fees to support liberal causes. In spite of these threats conservatism is still growing in the form of various religious, political, and intellectual student groups.
Even though I never got a bad grade because of my views there were times where the leftism in my recent graduate school was quite apparent. I was constantly lectured on the risks associated with the Patriot Act and the government search of library records. I repeatedly pointed out that no library records have ever been searched through the Patriot Act, but that the justice department under the Clinton administration had (rightly in my opinion) subpoenaed library patron records in the hunt for the unabomber before the Patriot Act was passed. This was new information that many of my classmates had trouble reconciling with an almost paranoid dislike of the Patriot Act. However, even accounting for the overemphasis on the Patriot Act in class I did not have to parrot your professor's politics to get a good grade at my universities. I even once saw the chair of my graduate studies department chew out some fellow students for improperly inserting politics (they were against Bush of course) into a class discussion that should have had nothing to do with politics.
Part of the problem arises from what professors and universities see their job as being. Is it a search for truth or a chance for indoctrination? Instead of asking us to investigate the history and examine the ethics of library searches we were often told to respond to the Patriot Act including in one case where I had to write a paper about what to do if our patrons were being investigated through the Patriot Act and how I should react. In contrast to this my undergraduate advisor had studied under Robert Nozick and seemed fairly libertarian in his views, but always assigned a wide variety of readings from Marx to Nietzsche to Nozick. In class he would often defend the minority position even if he did not agree with it, just so there would be a good debate and we would have to think harder. The problem with many of these city journal stories and with this story from a few days ago is that professors are telling their students what conclusion to come to before they have studied the issue, which is the opposite order that it should be in.
This brings us to the final link of this post, which is about a new PhD who thinks that Condoliza Rice should "loses the right to practice political science" because of her views. Eugene Volokh asks "I had thought that academics had a pretty standard response for dealing with people who promulgate ideas that academics think are unwise: It's called "criticism" via "persuasion." Why isn't that good enough for the good Doctor?"
Update: In related news Indian River Community College in Florida has basically shut down a Christian student group for attempting to show The Passion of the Christ. Administrators gave the original explanation for banning the movie was because the movie was rated R, but earlier in the year the college had allowed a play called F**king for Jesus that depicted actors performing simulated sex with a picture of Jesus. After the students complained about being censored the college imposed rules requiring faculty advisors to attend all student group meetings, which effectively shut down the group which had too many meetings for the advisor to attend all of them. The college has also demanded written apologies from the students who dared to complain that their first ammendment rights were being denied. Thankfully the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is on the case.
Posted by Pete at January 14, 2005 09:27 AM
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