Leftish Professors

The notion that there is political lopsidedness in academia tilted to the left is an old canard propagated by anti-intellectual ideologists who do not now and never had a taste for truth. And now, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times has written a piece titled, Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left, about a study done by two sociologists, Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, that is full of abject nonsense and comments from proponents of the right wing.

She writes this, either quoting or paraphrasing these sociologists: "Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up." How? Most students enter college without ever having seen any college professor. Never having seen a college professor, how could this "classic image" have influenced them?

Although she correctly points how this view has been manufactured and fostered by the American conservative movement, she fails to draw any conclusions from it. Conservatives, either religious or otherwise, are true believers. To them the truth is irrelevant, and if truth is irrelevant, the search for it and its acquisition is of no interest. When these people enter college, they do so to merely acquire techniques. Their questions are, how do I do that? and of what use is learning that? They rarely ask, is that the truth?

But what Ms Cohen and the conservatives who promote this canard fail to recognize it that the political orientations of most professors have no relevance to anything they do in the classroom. What difference would it make to students if a professor who teaches mathematics were a republican, a democrat, a socialist, a communist, or even an anarchist? What about professors of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Foreign Languages, English Grammar, Geology, and most other subjects? Who cares what they believe?

To all professors—liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, or anarchist—two plus two is four, H₂O is water, e equals mc², the planets revolve around the sun, and the sun is not the center of the universe.

Professors teach what is known in their own subject-matter fields. How would knowing what their voter registration cards say further the conservative-liberal debate? (I even doubt that anything that can truly be called a debate exists.) There are just a small number of academic departments where a professor's political beliefs might influence his teaching. Notice, I wrote "might." Most professors, at least the good ones, can easily present the best arguments used by both sides with equal vigor. They can also present the criticisms. For some unknown reason it is assumed by the right that a scholar's beliefs trump his knowledge. Is that because their beliefs trump their knowledge? True believers already know it all; they can't be taught. The university is not a place in which they are comfortable because questioning their beliefs generates distress and places their self-interests in jeopardy.

The Western World's ideal of education stems from Classical Greece where Plato started the first real university. His ideals were the search and dissemination of truth, goodness, and beauty. If you study Plato's Dialogues you will discover just how hard he was on people's beliefs. He used the character of Socrates to demolish them.

Those who believe that universities should include the teaching of beliefs and ideologies are advocating the conversion of the university into what is called, in the Middle East, a madrassa. Americans of late have been very hard on madrasses, complaining that they teach the ideology of Islamic jihad. Yes, they do. Which ideology of jihad does the American right want the American university to teach?

True believers never discover truth. It is only discovered by doubting what is commonly believed and trying to either verify or refute it. In that light, much ideology is not worth bothering about; no evidence can be offered for it one way or the other.

Some students enter college with open minds and a desire to know. Many don't; knowing does not interest them. And if anyone really wants to know how professors become leftish, read Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, where Ehrman describes how he, a student with a fundamentalist Christian background, found the strengths of his fundamentalist beliefs weakening as he learned more and more about how the Bible came to be.

In my career as a professor, I was aware of only one professor who used his classroom as a platform for his personal political beliefs. Contrary to what Ms Cohen might assume, he was an arch conservative. The students who took his courses were well aware of what he was doing; they spoke about it all the time, just as Mankiw’s students of economics at Harvard have publicly described Mankiw’s course as massive conservative propaganda.

No professor at the university I taught at ever made an issue of this professor's propagandish teaching. They didn't have to; they all knew that the bright students in his classes recognized it for what it was and that the dull students didn't matter. They weren't going to learn much anyhow. And that may really be what distinguishes leftish professors from rightish ones. The leftish ones allow students to draw their own conclusions.

Anyone who leaves college with the same beliefs had when he/she entered has wasted his/her money and time. What the conservatives who have manufactured and propagated this leftish professor canard want to do is destroy the search for truth by falsely describing it as a political ideology. All they want to do is erase the distinction between knowledge and belief. They comprise, in fact, nothing but a modern day Papal Inquisition.

The only reason this canard keeps popping up is that journalism is a label that leans toward stupidity. It will go away when journalists quit reporting it. (1/22/2010)

©2010 John Kozy  

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