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Have no fear of liberal professors
Last week one of my students expressed a conventional sentiment about colleges and politics: with her daughter approaching high school graduation, she was wondering aloud if she and her husband would be able to invest their child with conservative principles sufficient to resist the liberalism that will confront her in the classroom when she goes off to college.
My student was buying in to a standard depiction of colleges and universities as strongholds of liberal indoctrination: conservative students enroll in college and emerge a few years later with liberal tendencies or, in some cases, as full-blown leftists.
These fears aren’t irrational; at the risk of stating the obvious, college professors trend toward the left politically. The 2007-2008 Almanac Issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that at all institutions surveyed, more than 43 percent of full-time faculty members classified their political views as “liberal,” and almost 8 percent called them “far left.” At public universities these two categories accounted for 59 percent of the faculty.
Even more telling, these professors put their money where their mouths are: the Oct. 24 issue of the Chronicle, using data from the Center for Responsive Politics, reports that college professors and administrators contributed $12.2 million to Barack Obama’s campaign and only $1.5 million to John McCain’s.
Leverage
Numbers like these provide considerable leverage to conservatives like David Horowitz, whose Freedom Center reports among its accomplishments for 2006 the identification of the “curricula of radicalism that tenured leftists are imposing on our students under the pretext of providing them with an education.” Further, the Center did the country the favor of identifying its most “dangerous” professors, who are using our public classrooms to propagandize for “America’s enemies in a time of war.”
No wonder my student is worried.
One the other hand, she will find some comfort in a Nov. 2 New York Times article by Patricia Cohen (”Professors’ Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not”), which reports on three current studies that suggest that college teachers have little impact on the evolution of their students’ political principles.
In fact, one study by three professors from George Mason University indicates that parents, family, news media, and peers have a much greater influence over students’ political leanings than college professors do. One of the professors argues that when it comes to politics, it’s “really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15.”
This notion is supported by my own teaching experience with several thousand freshmen and sophomores at colleges and universities during the last 25 years. In general, students get their politics from the same place they get their religion: their parents. My students often have their political views well established by the time they reach my classroom. Some of them haven’t thought much about politics, but very few are passively disposed for indoctrination based merely on a professor’s position as an authority figure. Not that I would try. I believe that Horowitz overstates the enthusiasm that college professors have for proselytizing students to their way of thinking, a tactic that serves well his career as the primary public adversary of the radical liberal professoriate. For every energetic advocate of the far left I suspect that hundreds of college professors honor an obligation to engage ideas with a careful, deliberate approach that takes contradictory viewpoints into consideration and resists the temptation to wield undue influence over their students.
X John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.