Given all the recent brouhaha about liberal college professors, a person could be forgiven for thinking that our college campuses were dens of communist propaganda affecting the fate of America. What's so strange about these accusations is that anyone gives them the time of day when they're so obviously laughable.
It's hard to believe that conservative Republicans really feel oppressed in modern America: They control all three branches of the Federal government. On the state level, the GOP controls the majority of governorships. Conservatives dominate a huge and powerful ideological media landscape, including Fox News, nearly all of talk radio and, increasingly, other cable networks like MSN. In the wake of the Iraq war and Dan Rather's failure to check the Killian memos' fonts, even the mainstream media are tilting right in an effort to avoid accusations of liberal bias. For a party with that much control, it's hard to believe that they really feel put upon by such a powerless group as college professors.
But that appears to be the case. Certainly it's true that most professors self-identify as Democrats rather than Republicans. That this has been able to support charges of academic discrimination is testament to conservatives' power to dominate media coverage and keep liberals on the defensive. (And since when do conservatives believe that statistical differences between groups can be explained by intentional discrimination, anyway? Haven't they spent years telling us that there was no glass ceiling or \mommy track"" keeping women out of corporate boardrooms, despite the statistical evidence?)
The idea of an insidious liberal menace in the classroom is preposterous on its face. College professors can barely get their students to do homework, let alone brainwash them into joining their preferred political party. Social science research suggests that political preferences tend to be set by age 18 or 19, so even if professors wanted to change students' minds, they wouldn't have much success.
And what proof is there that professors are so unrepentantly lefty, anyway? Many people who don't think of themselves as Democrats nonetheless support a vast array of traditional liberal positions. Recent surveys suggest that a majority of Americans support both legal abortion and euthanasia. The same Florida counties where Bush scored his highest tallies also voted overwhelmingly to raise the minimum wage last November. Maybe everyday people don't think of themselves as liberal because they don't know how far to the right their elected representatives are. If professors held these perfectly normal majority views but realized that they were liberal ideas, then of course they'd be more likely to identify themselves as liberals, if not Democrats.
Even granting that professors were more likely to be Democrats, I don't see why this is surprising. Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten on up, are likely to be Democrats. By contrast, business people tend to be Republicans. Nurturing children is part of the liberal mindset while the competition of big business fits right into the conservative point of view. This seems like perfectly normal self-selection to me.
Of course, no one denies that some academics are very conservative, even at the most liberal schools. Unsurprisingly, these academics tend to be in conservative fields like business, law, or engineering. Further, they tend to be much better funded than their liberal counterparts. There's plenty of money to work on projects for the Pentagon or oil companies.
In addition, right wing think-tanks are heavily funded by the elites who benefit from their conservative arguments. For example, the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundations, both large, well-funded rightist institutions, have been laying out justifications for privatizing social security for years. Now Bush has picked up these fully-developed ideas and melded them into his media campaign. My freshman biology teacher may have thought that protecting endangered species was a good idea, but he certainly didn't get paid by Democrats and their allies to create ideology or persuasive justifications for it.
In any case, spending time arguing about the merits of the issue is probably a mistake. Surely it's worth noting why the idea that leftist professors dominate the academy is clearly wrong. But the best way to do so is not by fighting about details, but by challenging its central premise. By noting that his charges were ludicrous, liberals were easily able to deflect Rush Limbaugh's recent claims that Clint Eastwood's new film, ""Million Dollar Baby,"" contained some leftist message. That charge, like claims of liberal academics running rampant, was plainly ridiculous. The man who brought us vigilante cop Dirty Harry, who was at one point the elected Republican mayor of Carmel, Calif., is clearly not part of a left-wing Hollywood conspiracy. Anyone with a whit of sense can tell that. The same is true of the pseudo-scandal of the liberal professors.
The effort is underway to dominate media discussion across the board through constant accusations of liberal bias in college lecture halls. Forget what this says about how the Democrats ought to get their act together and start presenting a consistent media message in our sound bite society. The claim is so absurd that it isdifficult to argue against.
Josh Gildea is a third-year law student. His column runs every Thursday in The Daily Cardinal.
