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Liberal Bias! Liberal Bi... Nevermind
Submitted by Dan U-A on Tue, 01/10/2006 - 8:54am.
A few weeks ago I talked about the next stop for the War on Christmas brigade: Pennsylvania Academia. Hearings were to be held, to determine just how many poor conservative kids had been wronged by their professors. And yesterday, at Temple, we saw the grand sum of these injustices on display; and boy am I ashamed of my fellow liberals:
Yesterday's hearing on academic freedom at Pennsylvania's public universities was hyped by conservative activists as a "historic moment," in which school administrators would finally be "called to account" in front of state legislators for allowing student "indoctrination and abuse" by leftist professors.
But the hearing at Temple University did not live up to that billing.
A professor scheduled to testify about alleged rampant liberal bias at Temple canceled. The sole student to appear before the legislative committee acknowledged he had never filed a formal grievance.
And Temple president David Adamany testified that in fact no student had made an official classroom bias complaint in at least five years, despite well-developed policies and procedures for doing so.
Whoops! The only question is, with the cannon fire from the War on Academia sounding a distinct dud, where does the Christmas brigade turn to next? I wait with baited breath.
(Hat tip to Jeff for forwarding the article.)
the reason you don't hear abo
the reason you don't hear about the liberal bias is because there is a liberal bias in the place that processes liberal bias complaints!
IT'S A CONSPIRACY.
(That was sarcasm by the way, I generally hate these brand of 'conservatives' too)
"Social Liberal, Conservative Just-About-Everything-Else"
Can Almost See the Point If I Squint Real Hard
Full disclosure: I'm a grad student and adjunct instructor in the philosophy department at Temple.
I ran across a conservative web site's commentary on these hearings last night. (I was doing a Technorati search for references to John Dewey for a roundup post on my blog, Not News.) And I do think that the overall point about liberal bias in the classroom is overblown.
But it is certainly the case the instructors have a lot of power to control discussion in their classes, from setting the syllabus to how they respond to questions. And it is true that some students, when faced with a professor who doesn't seem interested in responding to challenges or questions, will decide that it just isn't worth the bother and mentally disconnect from the class. This is true of "purely academic" issues, like whether or not analytic philosophy of language is a viable approach these days. So of course it's going to be true of issues like history, race and gender relations, economics, and so on that have an unescapable political dimension.
To me, though, that's not an issue of "bias in the classroom." That's an issue of "poor teaching." I can understand why a student might feel differently, but I don't think it's anything to involve lawmakers in.