THERE HAS BEEN an uproar recently among conservative groups about the lack of conservative professors on college campuses. In a recent study of the political ideologies of professors in various colleges across the country, less than 10 percent identified themselves as being a conservative in their political affiliation.
I am tempted to say that this is because college professors tend to be more informed and open-minded, but I am going to resist that temptation.
Yes, there are quite a lot of liberals on college campuses, but if the acid test of hiring practices on college campuses is whether they produce an ideological cross-section of America, we are probably short of Nazis in the professorial ranks.
It may be true that college professors have the power to influence the thoughts of their students, but none of my professors has ever told me how to think.
Last year, in my Environmental Systems class, I was exposed to before and after pictures of receding glaciers across the world and shown graphs depicting rising temperatures, but no one ever told me that “global warming” was the cause, just that it was a possibility. I had a chance to weigh the evidence and choose my own opinion, which is the beauty of college.
If a professor were to present a blatant lie as the truth they would have no business being a professer, but to interpret the truth and present it as opinion is not a violation of the student-teacher relation.
The only politics that I have been exposed to since I began attending this university have been of my choosing. The ability to seek out and associate with people and organizations of many philosophical bents is one of the benefits of attending a non-sectarian university. Whether I feel like joining PRIDE or Campus Crusade, I also have that option, the pundits who accuse colleges and universities of bias hiring practices are not taking into account the ability that students have to think for themselves.
In my opinion one can’t judge the hiring practices of an institution based on the party affiliations of their faculty. The discrimination supposedly evidenced by this study, were it true, is so blatant that it could not have gone undetected up to this point. It is more likely that the lack of conservative professors on campuses across the country is a result of a combination of factors, such as the tendency of conservatives to avoid low paying jobs and the tendency of liberals to gravitate towards educational and community service oriented jobs.
I’m not trying to imply that conservatives do not have the capacity or the desire to teach. I just believe that conservatives generally find other fields more interesting and rewarding. The fact that conservative political pundits would blame this on liberals, however, is ridiculous.
One of the main difficulties of implying that there is a “conservative” or “liberal” bias in any particular segment of society is that it is nearly impossible to prove. There are many fields that liberals tend to gravitate to more than conservatives do. One of the more politicized examples is the army – which tends to vote as a conservative block. Am I to believe that there is a prejudice in army hiring practices because there are not more liberals in it?
My feeling is that, whether my professers influence my thoughts or not they are not telling me what to think, and most classes are not politicized in any case. I think that conservative pundits should take on something more worth their while: increasing the number of hunters working for Green Peace.
