If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to
influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee
Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and
an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in
American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).The
notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said
Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. When it comes to
shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change
the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research
on faculty and students.
Here is the story.
Isn’t the bigger objection the amount to which the faculty, lopsided as it is, shapes the academic debate and excludes voices that do not conform or can not find the intellectual space to develop ideas in the collaborative manner demanded by modern academic life?
It’s not that the professors make conservatives into liberals. The problem is that already moderately liberal students don’t hear the counter-viewpoint and stay liberal. So, there isn’t even an opportunity for right-of-center positions to win the debate and gain converts. So, even if 2% of the student body flips from conservative to liberal due to faculty views and no liberals switch their position, that would have a massive effect.
What about the teachers they have before 15?
Hard to change after 15? I changed my mind in college and I am sure that many others have, too.
I became a libertarian due to a professor I had in undergrad.
I became a libertarian because of Rush (Not Limbaugh). I’m so sure professors have zero marginal effect.
I chuckled to myself at the thought that liberals might use these two academic papers as irrefutable evidence that professors can’t affect political views.
Yeah, I love the idea that not exposing a certain set of political ideological view points can have no effect on the ideological viewpoints of students.
While professors can and do suck at persuasion…it is pretty pathetic that a conservative college student can graduate and never read anything by Milton Friedman or Hayek.
I find the whole notion of outrage odd to begin with.
Aren’t most college students pursuing degrees that are more aligned with right-brain thinking, which has been correlated with liberal inclination?
I went into college as a political science major with fairly left leaning ideals. I was against privatization of social security, I thought socialized health care was a basic human right and was therefore a good idea, I thought welfare was a good idea because it kept poor people from resorting to crime…I thought many things that I no longer believe.
I came out of college having developed a great interest economics and graduated with a BS in polisci and economics and a minor in math. Over this time, I discovered the works of Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat, Mises, Hayek…etc and had a personal ideological revolution.
I became much more fiscally conservative, less socially liberal but more progressive and changed my belief of the roll of the government. Though I still consider myself an independent, I most closely identify myself with libertarian values.
So I would say (though not my personal experience) that a person’s family has much more of an influence on someone being liberal than college. And once exposed to many of the works even basic gen eds expose students to, I would say a fair amount become more conservative in their ideological beliefs.
I think the outrage is a bit misplaced too, but I don’t have to be a mindreader to understand getting upset at my tax money being used to propagandize others with views opposite to my own, if I were a conservative.
They say that there is a definite shift towards liberalism, not that liberals select liberal-oriented majors, which I’m sure they do, but that doesn’t explain the shift.
Steve,
I’m not sure what you think I said, but I didn’t.
So, here’s something you can really snipe at. From the reporting, the papers seem to prove that professors don’t often turn solid Ayn Rand readers into Naomi Klein followers, or at least aren’t the main factor. I don’t have to discount the research to critique it as far as it goes, which isn’t far. The marginal effect has been pointed out and there is plenty more critique. It’s hard to prove an insignificant effect, especially when poorly selecting factors.
So, now I have to write bad sociology papers in order to critique their methodology? As if Cato or AEI sponsored such research that wouldn’t be the first critique. They might even do it if they knew any university researchers. I was going to be polite about Brookings.
I was a literature major in college and I felt like I was some kind of marxist seminary at times. People who enter the humanities may lean slightly to the left when they start, but it’s difficult for me to believe that they don’t move much further left by their senior year because of the curriculum and their professors. At the same time, it’s going to be hard to disentangle the selection effects from any causal effects. Maybe you could use freshman composition courses to help identify a causal effects. Everyone has to take English 101 and the assignment of the lecturer/professor/grad student is largely random. That might actually let you test whether teacher political beliefs influence student political beliefs in the humanities.
I really don’t get this obsession with the supposedly liberal academia. As an undergrad at a liberal arts school, more than a few of my classes required us to read Capitalism and Freedom and Wealth of Nations, as well as a bit of Hayek. And the professor in every case refused to find fault in the authors’ work. When I brought up that Smith’s LToV was a ridiculous basis for a theory of economics, I was smacked down by the Prof. When I mentioned that Friedman was begging the question in one of his arguments, I was ignored. “Liberal” professors my a**!
James:
On to the regressions, they found no significant effect at the institutional level i.e. average political makeup of the university on students. Of course you really want regressions at the student level with information on what class they took by what professor. Classes that are not capable of being politically charged e.g. engineering are probably biasing the results down.
I doubt it, because it would mean that ‘leftness’ of an institution would correlate positively with the amount of a-political ‘hard science’ classes. At least here in the Netherlands it’s completely opposite: the technical universities are relatively right wing, the arts and social sciences universities left wing. If there is a substance of classes effect on indoctrination of students by faculty, it should positively bias the relationship between the politics of the faculty and the politics of the students, not the other way around.
JSK,
I don’t quite follow your point about the movements in correlation. Nonetheless I should not have used the word bias in a non technical sense. It is question of standard errors.
My point was the fact if you hold the belief that “indoctrination” can only occur in classes will political-like areas of inquiry, then by including classes or areas of study that do not have the ability to “indoctrinate” lowers the power of your test. The authors do not and can not control for such classes. The sign on the coefficient for the effect of professor composition implies that more liberal they are the more liberal the students become and if I am reading their tables right (which aren’t well explained or labeled) the p value is .1 and .11 for different specifications, on the farther reaches of marginally significant. However, it would be surprising if the controls I suggest would decrease that standard error.
Essentially, if there is a relationship of “indoctrination” contained in liberal arts classes or departments it is quite possible it can’t get past the added noise when adding into the sample irrelevant information of non-politically charged classes. I don’t think this assumes anything along the lines of the correlations that you imply.
JSK,
Okay I get your point, now that I think a little about it. It would necessarily have to imply that correlation. There may be more conservatives in those fields and some liberals, but the liberals cannot pass on as much as there liberal thinking as in the social sciences. The effect is still dampened. And seeing that those fields take up a good percentage of the sample. It would not be surprising not to get a significant results
The hard sciences shall prevail victorious!
No matter how much one resists it ideology and philosophy that is not developed from personal experience have limited value. Real life trumps both, and mitigates the viral impact of both.
Strangely, one of my first college classes was a one-hundred level art history class. I suspected that the class would have a liberal spin or hopefully an eccentric one, but to my dismay our professor wasted a great deal of our time trying to convince the class that all great art, architecture, and innovation were the result of conservative thinkers. He did not explain that it was only one way a person could think about it.
I am aware of a small town that had oppressive laws regarding noise or practically anything young people engaged in and it is possible to say that conservatism had an unintended effect in this case. A strong underground movement began and from that movement incredible artists in various fields emerged from the community to make their mark on their environment as they struggled to remove conservative oppression and unrealistic values.
Many conservative intellectual arguments are deliberately deceptive, extracting quotations that justify preconceived ideas to fit their world view is quite common, but its core value is dishonesty. It perceives dishonesty as an inalienable right that has equal footing with free speech. This behavior is based on the “principle” that if one can deceive another it makes him superior to that individual.
Any chance Tyler or Alex would go on the Lew Rockwell show? This interview with Naomi Wolf is interesting. Sounds like even Naomi Wolf is starting to become more educated about the Fed than Tyler “the paulson plan is better than nothing” Cowen.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/?p=episode&name=2008-10-30_058_americas_slow_motion_fascist_coup.mp3
The Woessner study looks at the impact of a single course and concludes that it is small. That’s like saying the impact of a single newspaper article is small. It’s a big leap to say the media have no impact on the election.
A second logical flaw is from failure to see that the influence of professors is indirect and dispersed to the students as a group. The students’ views are tied to their peers. (See “The Nurture Assumption† by Judith Harris.) The studies conclude that leftward shifts in political ideology could not be attributed to proselytizing professors, but rather to general trends among that age group. If the authors were studying cattle they’d attribute the cows’ movement not to the herders, but rather to general trends of the herd.
The Times gives the game away in admitting the data that show a liberal drift from freshman to senior year among college students. This opens the way to a quite simple experiment: study a sample of 18 to 22 year olds who don’t go to college, and compare their political movement to that of college students. Unless you are prepared to believe that the brighter young people (those going to college) would have moved leftward on their own anyway because of their superior brightness (an assumption, by the way, that makes less and less sense with the democratization of higher education), then any difference found would confirm the thesis of influential leftward bias.
The deeper problem, in any case, is that our educational system is failing to produce people who can articulate the views normally associated with what are normally called conservatism or libertarianism—a failure that harms the whole country, not just the adherents of that viewpoint, as we are about to be reminded in the next four years.
Do you know who is Victor Belenko?
He was the son of a communist, the grandson of a communist ,and was educated by communist.He was trusted with a mig 25 and then he flied it to Japan and surrended to the american, after an automatic gesture of blanding his arm against the western devils.Indoctrination?
do you really think a 20 yo cate about what anyone over 30 says?
Meter,
I’ve counted this as about the 4th or 5th time you’ve said that. Now, I’m sure that liberals don’t mis-characterize libertarian positions so the fault is all ours. So, why don’t you give me some specifics to work with?
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you must have an idea in your heart
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