In everything but thought:
A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.
I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.
Instead, he reiterated them on the record. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.
He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.
“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”
From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.
This is one of the reasons that the education bubble will eventually pop. Parents aren’t going to remain willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to Indoctrinate U.
How shocking to learn that quotas are bad…
A more draconian option is to enact a political litmus test and mandate that Republicans fill a certain number of positions, but doing so would exclude many qualified professors and be unfairly discriminatory.
So now can we say that advocates of quotas are bigots?
I was in Santa Fe a few years back and bumped into a pretty large Anti-Bush/Cheney rally in the Pavilion square. It was right around when they had just came up with the ‘Torture in Chief’ bumper sticker and they repeated it about 100 times throughout the rally. A good portion of the crowd was frothing at the mouth and screaming in tongues with religious zealotry. There was one lady who looked like she was yelling at some invisible person about 3 feet in front of her. She was red in the face, spittle flying screams, hammering her fist, and wagging her finger as she admonished some imaginary foe. I have video but I never got around to posting it on Youtube.
Clearly this professor had never been to the University of Texas. Austin is considered the Berkeley of the south. Both the New Deal and the Great Society trace their roots to faculty from UT that influenced John Nance Garner (Roosevelt’s’ VP) and President Johnson.
As a side note this is why online education is booming since the design process for online classes makes it much more difficult to inject political bias into them. In addition the for-profit universities I teach for have a much stronger customer focus then state run universities which tends to eliminate administrators with radical political viewpoints quickly.
Haven’t people been predicting a backlash against liberal academia for forty years? College is more expensive than ever, but applications and attendance are also at an all-time high. I don’t see colleges changing much while there is so much demand for their current product.
That professor is so ignorant he thinks red state schools are hot beds of conservatism. Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, is known locally as Berkley on the Wakarusa.
Academia is utterly dominated by leftists.
Yours,
Tom
Haven’t people been predicting a backlash against liberal academia for forty years? College is more expensive than ever, but applications and attendance are also at an all-time high.
You sound like a real estate agent talking about the housing bubble burst circa 2006. But the growth of enrollment has been declining since 2000, and now we have Obama’s economy to consider.
Yes, like much else of economics, Jim doesn’t understand the nature of bubbles.
While obviously a problem, UO is not the best test case for political diversity. In some areas they can even make Berkley look conservative.
Haven’t people been predicting a backlash against liberal academia for forty years? College is more expensive than ever, but applications and attendance are also at an all-time high. I don’t see colleges changing much while there is so much demand for their current product.
Why would demand go down for such a heavily subsidized product? I loaded up at the education buffet myself because it was so cheap and was something I wanted to do. If it was more expensive or competitive, I’d probably not bother. One can pick up quite a few letters after one’s name these days.
Fortunately, the hard science fields are pretty resistant to the liberal politics of a school. I had a professor comment on my crank posts in Transterrestrial (I did respect his opinion, but not enough to change my ways). Most didn’t care.
Actually, an education bubble is just what the affirmative action doctor ordered. As you may have heard, the under representation of women in science and technology, (particularly the academic arm thereof) epso facto implies discrimination and patriarchic oppression has taken place. Ergo, by government edict, they will now take their rightful place.
The best, and fastest way for this to happen is a massive professor layoff due to the depression followed by hiring new “minority” applicants when the recovery occurs.
The majority of science professors of my aquaintence have been well left of center. I’ll be interested in what, if any effect this has on their world view. 🙂