"Liberal" Higher Education
From a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"The professor of the year at Southern Utah University was fired this week for reasons that are unclear, though his supporters say his dismissal had to do with his liberal political views... Mr. Roberds said he had long been a 'thorn' in the administration's side because of his liberal political views. An article on OnlyinUtah.org, a student-run Web site, asserts that the university is 'weeding out' professors who do not fit the 'Conservative Utah Brand.'"
If the allegation ran the other way, you can be damnably sure that shyster David Horowitz would be thumping his "Academic Bill of Rights" like the Bible. I don't know if this prof really was dismissed for his politics, but this incident helps explode the myth of higher education as a bastion of liberalism. The right loves to pretend that universities and colleges are seething with Leninists and Trotskyites, but this notion is both ludicrous on its face and contradictory to many conservative principles - individual agency, for instance. How weak-minded must students be, if they just believe everything some crypto-Castro philosopher says in seminar? Anyone who's ever taught a college class knows how hard it is to get undergrads to remember their textbooks, much less key facts, much less the tenets your subversive ideology.
Truth is, colleges and universities mostly reflect their communities, if only because most institutions of higher learning draw most of their students from a fairly restricted geographical area. Students tend to want to go to places that meet some basic need, which is usually pretty banal: a location close to home, convenient class times, interesting majors, low tuition. Sometimes the needs are somewhat more abstract, such as a religious affiliation or a political ideology, but even then localism obtains and students stamp the place with an identity that not even the most skilled tenured radical can destroy.
There's a lot more to this issue of "liberal higher ed," of course, and I'll keep trying to hammer at it.
"The professor of the year at Southern Utah University was fired this week for reasons that are unclear, though his supporters say his dismissal had to do with his liberal political views... Mr. Roberds said he had long been a 'thorn' in the administration's side because of his liberal political views. An article on OnlyinUtah.org, a student-run Web site, asserts that the university is 'weeding out' professors who do not fit the 'Conservative Utah Brand.'"
If the allegation ran the other way, you can be damnably sure that shyster David Horowitz would be thumping his "Academic Bill of Rights" like the Bible. I don't know if this prof really was dismissed for his politics, but this incident helps explode the myth of higher education as a bastion of liberalism. The right loves to pretend that universities and colleges are seething with Leninists and Trotskyites, but this notion is both ludicrous on its face and contradictory to many conservative principles - individual agency, for instance. How weak-minded must students be, if they just believe everything some crypto-Castro philosopher says in seminar? Anyone who's ever taught a college class knows how hard it is to get undergrads to remember their textbooks, much less key facts, much less the tenets your subversive ideology.
Truth is, colleges and universities mostly reflect their communities, if only because most institutions of higher learning draw most of their students from a fairly restricted geographical area. Students tend to want to go to places that meet some basic need, which is usually pretty banal: a location close to home, convenient class times, interesting majors, low tuition. Sometimes the needs are somewhat more abstract, such as a religious affiliation or a political ideology, but even then localism obtains and students stamp the place with an identity that not even the most skilled tenured radical can destroy.
There's a lot more to this issue of "liberal higher ed," of course, and I'll keep trying to hammer at it.
posted by Christopher Tassava at Wednesday, January 05, 2005
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