David Bernstein thinks that the liberals are indoctrinating their students. And presumably, this is ruining the country, because otherwise how will his law school (George Mason, the least academically diverse in the country) keep finding new conservative law professors?
Professor Bernstein does have, I must admit, killer evidence. He "certainly knew some students at Brandeis" when he went to college there twenty years ago "who started as moderates" but "shifted at least somewhat leftward" before graduating.
Not to worry, though. "There were also some students who were driven to the right by some of what they encountered in politicized departments like Sociology and English." That is, one of his friends was annoyed by a teaching assistant asking the class about the absence of female characters in a book.
Like Bernstein, I also have only anecdotal evidence off the top of my head, but I trust it more than his because I’m not completely insane. And that is: In none of my English classes did any of my professors attempt to or in fact indoctrinate me or any of my classmates.
The thing that people like Bernstein and his buddy David Horowitz don’t get is that political beliefs have nothing to do with what English professors and students actually do. You can want low taxes and more torture of Muslims and hate the poor and the gays all you like, and that will not affect (at all!) your analysis of the apocalypse as part of the Arthurian tradition, your explication of wound imagery in Richard Crashaw’s Resurrectional poetry, or your thesis that Ben Jonson’s oppositional poetics of architecture perform cultural work which subversively attacks the social order of his day.
I will admit that I can speculate, fairly confidently, that at least three of my English professors were liberal and at least two were conservative. There was still no indoctrination, and this had zero effect on class discussion, my work, or my grades. Sorry, but I can’t speak for sociology. I might, however, also note that my philosophy professors tended, if anything, to be conservative (or other, but certainly not part of the liberal orthodoxy by which these besieged conservatives stupidly feel threatened).
Although to be fair, I suppose it’s possible that the physicists did indoctrinate their students on the liberal theory of "science."
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “College Professors, Indoctrination, and Paranoid Conservatives (Joe)”
Joe,
You left out the geology and biology departments and the unholy nest of Bible-deniers who inhabit it! Anyone unfortunate enough to venture into those will definitely come out as brain-washed liberals ;)
LikeLike
Indoctrinate: “To imbue with learning, to teach.” Thus OED. Okay, I won’t be coy. That was entry 1.a; entry 1.c reads: “To imbue with, a doctrine, idea, or opinion. spec. To imbue with Communist ideas, etc. (cf. INDOCTRINATION).” Bernstein’s insipid post would be more interesting were he to explore these rudimentary dictionary meanings, rather than insinuating more sinister dynamics.
The update about the T.A.’s question presuming the absence of female characters in Moby Dick also calls for a dictionary. There is a dearth, perhaps, but not a total absence. Chapter 15, “Chowder,” for instance, includes this passage:
And so on. Of course, this is picking nits when the really absurd—or, as Joe properly characterizes this state of affairs, insane—circumstance is a bored student with a chip on (I’m guessing) his shoulder, who takes offense at a perfectly legitimate query about the book and Melville’s focus on males and masculine endeavor!
LikeLike
Thanks for this post Joe.
As a former college lecturer I can attest that there is very little of the indoctrination Horowitz fears, even in the English department. Stanley Fish has written quite cogently that gratuitous expression of one’s own political views have no place in a class where the subject matter is, say, Milton’s poetry. It’s really an issue of professional ethics — a good teacher has to remember that the audience is captive, and that were the situation reversed, the teacher sure wouldn’t want to sit having a student lecture her on what to believe for 140 minutes a week!
That said, there are some topics, like the literature of the 1960s, where a stance of neutrality is harder to maintain. Also, there are some professors, such as Fredric Jameson, who hold genuinely radical views and have a right to intellectual freedom as well. Which is why it’s worrisome that conservatives feel emboldened to induce students to report their teachers for holding views that diverge with the orthodoxies of the American right: http://www.uclaprofs.com/index.html
It’s ironic that people who so often kvetch about “political correctness” clearly can’t handle any cognitive dissonance!
LikeLike