Bias In Academia: Today's Informal Student Poll
So today I asked one of my classes the following question:
Do professors ever interject their personal beliefs into class?
Answer from the class: almost unanimous and immediate 'yes.'
Q: Are these opinions ever political?
A: overwheliming and immediate 'yes.' (3 students out of about 30 said 'no'.)
Q: Do these opinions have a tendency to be liberal or conservative or both or neither?
A: Liberal.
Q: Like what?
A: Most common answer: bashing George Bush. One student said that her Communication prof had spent so much time bashing Bush that they were unable to finish some of the material in the syllabus. One student said that her sociology prof spent the whole class pushing "Afrocentric" racial theories on them and arguing for reparations for slavery. One student said he came to believe that he was losing lots of points for disagreeing with the professor's politics, so he wrote a paper arguing for the opposite of what he thought was true, and got an 'A.' (Note: there's more than one explanation for that.)
Note: one student did say that one of his profs. gave out an assignment arguing against arguments against invading Iraq. According to this student, the in-class assignment seemed so biased to him--even, perhaps, intended to insult liberals--that he couldn't concentrate on the lesson. (Again: it might, of course, be the student rather than the prof. who is wrong here.)
One can complain that this survey is unscientific (of course it is), that the sample is small, and so forth. But this is the way we determine whether it's worth the effort to conduct scientific studies. The results described above are typical of the answers I've gotten out of discussions with my classes in the past.
Note also that my institution is, by college standards, fairly conservative.
I also asked them whether they had discerned what my politics were like, and, to my great satisfaction, they answered (apparently sincerely) in the negative. I hadn't given them any reason to think, but that point, that I'd be happy at such an answer. (Incidentally, I told them that I was weird, but tended to agree with liberals more often than with conservatives.)
So today I asked one of my classes the following question:
Do professors ever interject their personal beliefs into class?
Answer from the class: almost unanimous and immediate 'yes.'
Q: Are these opinions ever political?
A: overwheliming and immediate 'yes.' (3 students out of about 30 said 'no'.)
Q: Do these opinions have a tendency to be liberal or conservative or both or neither?
A: Liberal.
Q: Like what?
A: Most common answer: bashing George Bush. One student said that her Communication prof had spent so much time bashing Bush that they were unable to finish some of the material in the syllabus. One student said that her sociology prof spent the whole class pushing "Afrocentric" racial theories on them and arguing for reparations for slavery. One student said he came to believe that he was losing lots of points for disagreeing with the professor's politics, so he wrote a paper arguing for the opposite of what he thought was true, and got an 'A.' (Note: there's more than one explanation for that.)
Note: one student did say that one of his profs. gave out an assignment arguing against arguments against invading Iraq. According to this student, the in-class assignment seemed so biased to him--even, perhaps, intended to insult liberals--that he couldn't concentrate on the lesson. (Again: it might, of course, be the student rather than the prof. who is wrong here.)
One can complain that this survey is unscientific (of course it is), that the sample is small, and so forth. But this is the way we determine whether it's worth the effort to conduct scientific studies. The results described above are typical of the answers I've gotten out of discussions with my classes in the past.
Note also that my institution is, by college standards, fairly conservative.
I also asked them whether they had discerned what my politics were like, and, to my great satisfaction, they answered (apparently sincerely) in the negative. I hadn't given them any reason to think, but that point, that I'd be happy at such an answer. (Incidentally, I told them that I was weird, but tended to agree with liberals more often than with conservatives.)
posted by Winston Smith at
2:29 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home