The Liberal Art of Education
Liberal Professors Influence the Education
Kelly Esposito
2006-09-22
Among the three rival universities in the Triangle area of North Carolina, UNC, Duke, and North Carolina State, let’s face it, UNC usually comes out on top. Be it an athletic event or otherwise, UNC students are rarely ashamed to admit complete domination. However, there is one comparison between the three schools in which students should be proud their fine university finished third. David Horowitz, a conservative writer and activist, came out with a book earlier this year entitled The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which he writes about the university faculty members he considers to be the worst purveyors of anti-Americanism and left-wing bias in schools across the nation. Of this list, our rival down Tobacco Road boasts two members, and the third member of the trio, N.C. State, has one professor named. UNC has no representation, which is a small triumph in itself, but we must be careful not be lulled into a false sense of security.
Horowitz has cited various reasons for the trend toward politicization in academia in his writing and appearances. For example, he testified to the Appropriations Committee of the Kansas House in March 2006 that one major cause is the emergence of the “imperial faculty,” in which “tenured members of the university community have become unaccountable to any authorities but their own.” This lack of effective university governance has, Horowitz claims, given radical-thinking professors the freedom to say anything they wish in the classroom, “even if that includes the political indoctrination of their students.” In The Professors, Horowitz offers the warning: “if you thought they were all harmless, antiquated hippies, you’d be wrong. Today’s radical academics aren’t the exception—they’re legion.”
UNC is no exception to what Horowitz considers to be the “intellectual corruption of our universities.” The national spotlight has been focused on Chapel Hill in recent years for incidents such as the controversy over the summer reading assignment in 2002 when Michael Sells' book "Approaching the Qur'án: The Early Revelations" was chosen for incoming freshmen to read, and the more recent debate over a potential donation from the John William Pope Foundation to fund a new Western Studies program. The Pope controversy was ignited because the Foundation funds the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative organization, and UNC faculty members were wary that such a donation from a conservative group would be a danger to academic freedom, according to The Daily Tar Heel. After nearly two years of debate and the University administration’s rejection of the Pope Foundation’s original proposal, it recently announced that the Pope Foundation will be donating $2 million to the athletic department and $300,000 to fund fellowship opportunities for undergraduates studying Western cultures. Both of these situations have garnered extensive media coverage, but there is more to these examples than just the headlines. Both are merely outward manifestations of a thinly disguised stranglehold on UNC by left-wing thinking.
Unfortunately, the leftist bias at UNC is not only present in the events that make national headlines. When an occurrence attracts high volumes of media attention, at the very least a healthy debate can take place in which both sides can make their views public. However, left-wing radicalism has permeated into places where such debate and public accountability is rarely possible: the classroom. This is a far more insidious demon, for biased professors can integrate their political leanings into the classroom in a multitude of ways, ranging from subtly leaving out sides of arguments they disagree with to blatantly spewing propaganda as truth to their students. Other techniques include the mocking and trivialization of opposing viewpoints, which can cause students who hold such views to be wary of expressing them in their academic work for fear of being penalized in their grade. In one anthropology class, sophomore Morgan Pope had a professor who was “pushy and pretty focused on her liberal point of view.” Pope explained that the behavior was not so extreme that the professor would not allow opposing viewpoints to be heard in class, but “when she disagreed with students she had a really standoffish attitude.” Pope’s main dissatisfaction in the class was not with in-class arguments, however, it was with the assignments and how she felt she might be graded if she expressed ideas that opposed the opinions of the instructor.
“I definitely geared my papers toward liberal ideals, because that’s what I felt she wanted to hear,” Pope explained.
The anthropology department seems to be well-represented in the populace of radical professors. Sophomore Jeremy Crouthamel recalls a “very liberally biased” anthropology class in which his professor “blamed a lot of today’s problems in society on conservatives.” The instructor “painted conservatives as people who didn’t care about the environment and who didn’t care about human rights and were just in everything for themselves.”
Sophomore Kate Hooks found herself academically cornered when her freshman English professor assigned a series of papers in which the students had to write about their political views and the candidates they supported. It at first seemed like a fair chance for everyone to express their own viewpoints, but Hooks hastened to add that, “the day before we were supposed to start writing the professor gave us a long speech about her views and why she liked the candidates she did.”
This immediately dispelled the illusion that the assignment was an opportunity for the students to let their voices be heard. “I felt like she was forcing her beliefs and views on our class,” Hooks said.
It is important to note that the majority of professors at UNC uphold their duty to students honorably and admirably. They for the most part teach both sides of potentially polarizing material and foster intelligent and healthy debate in their classes. However, a few bad seeds can have a widespread effect when their prejudice and close-mindedness trickles down the academic food chain. It is difficult to imagine how such negative portrayals of dissenting schools of thought like that described by Crouthamel from someone in a position of authority can possibly benefit the student body. It seems that this sort of bashing could easily carry over outside the classroom and foster tension and even hostility amongst students, a possibility that is quite out of sync with the concept of a university as a place where learning is paramount and variety of ideas and values should be able to coexist and thrive. Perhaps the most alarming aspect is that the perpetrating professors are not limited to certain majors or classes-- even freshmen in introductory classes are being subjected to biases and intolerance. Should that be part of first-year students’ initial impressions of the University? It is obvious from student accounts that the idealistic concept of a university is not always being upheld at UNC, so the question shifts to what can be done about it?
Admittedly, it is difficult to solve a problem that is rooted in part of the very foundation of a school, in this case, the faculty. However, the situation is far from hopeless. It comes as a boon to UNC students in the political minority that they attend a state school, because the North Carolina General Assembly is a viable option for holding the University accountable. The 2005 session of the General Assembly showed progress when Senate Bill 1139 was introduced, a bill that would require “each constituent institution of the University of North Carolina to adopt an ‘Academic Bill of Rights.’” The proposed Bill of Rights includes provisions such as “the constituent institution shall provide its students with a learning environment in which the students have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinions,” specifying that “curricula and reading lists…shall respect all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.” Most importantly, the bill mandates that “students shall be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers…and shall not be discriminated against on the basis of their political, ideological, or religious beliefs,” and that instructors “shall not use their courses…for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination.” The bill directly holds instructors accountable, which is what is needed if the left-wing bias in academia is to ever be rooted out. The bill was referred to the Committee on Education/Higher Education, and was not voted on before the congressional session ended.
Another option for combating academic bias is through an organization called Students for Academic Freedom, whose goal is “to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission.” According to the organization’s website, UNC has a chapter that can serve as a place for students to vocalize their experiences.
It does not necessarily matter how students choose to articulate their individual experiences with academic bias. What is important is that students make their experiences known, for doing nothing only emboldens the perpetrators. Hooks concluded her narration about her English class with a simple but poignant comment.
"It really made me angry,” she said.
Get angry, but don’t stew in silence. The only thing worse than academic discrimination and bias is not standing up to it.