UMD Bias Exemplifies the Larger Issue of Ideological Discrimation on Campuses

I posted the following on Ladies Logic this morning:

Let Freedom Ring writer Gary Gross noticed something strange posted on Twitter last night: The University of Minnesota-Duluth College Republicans tweeted, “UMD administration won’t let us put up signs for Tom Emmer, but yet the dems can put this up?” followed by a link to this photo of a Vote-for-Dayton sign endorsed by the College Democrats.

According to a recent press release, the College Republicans group had asked if they could post signs encouraging students to vote for Emmer, but were told by the University that “any type of poster or flyer that supported a candidate and encouraged students to vote for that candidate cannot be posted on campus.” The College Democrats, however, posted pro-Dayton flyers across campus. The University’s excuse for the College Democrats was apparently that these signs were giving directions to an upcoming Dayton rally, and would be taken down afterwards. Yet, after the rally, these signs were replaced with “a wave of posters telling students to vote for Mark Dayton for governor.”

Naturally, in light of this, the University denied having ever prohibited the College Republicans from doing the same and changed the rules to allow these postings on campus. Upon hearing that UMD had changed the rules to grant this privilege to the College Democrats, the College Republicans quickly came out with their own wave of “Vote for Chip” signs to support Congressional candidate Chip Cravaak who is running against 18th-term incumbent Jim Oberstar.

Though they can now post, it doesn’t change the fact that the College Democrats were able to keep their signs up “for the rally” and then post a whole series of signs encouraging students to vote for their candidate before the College Republicans were allowed to do so, giving one group an obvious campaigning advantage and demonstrating a clear bias in its dealings with student groups. The problem here is far greater than a single instance of double standards at a University. What the UMD CRs are going through is only one of many incidents of discrimination that public universities commit against conservative, libertarian and Republican students every single day, not only across campuses, but in classroom discussions and grading, in hiring faculty for academic departments and in setting the standards of academia.

As a College Republican at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, this news didn’t surprise me at all. As a matter of fact, if I brought it up to my fellow CRs here, no one would be surprised by yet another anecdote about public universities limiting conservative and libertarian discourse and implementing their left bias in the classrooms and across campus. This bias has been forcibly instituted on students through an entire system in academia that works to keep Conservative and Libertarian ideas out of the classroom and out of academic discourse. A few years ago, Annie Karni, writing for the New York Sun, wrote:

"Conservative professors must publish more than their liberal peers to be competitive for the same university jobs and promotions, according to new reports. At a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute today in Washington, D.C., researchers from across the country will present 18 papers that they say document the growing liberal bias in academia.
"Universities are tilting to the left, and it starts at the student level and goes all the way through to the hiring level and even to the promotion level," the vice president and director of the National Research Initiative at AEI, Henry Olsen, said. "This is a real problem, not anecdote masquerading as fact."

But is academia really controlled by the left because a majority of students lean to the left and that preference trickles upwards, or is it because, from an early age, students are forced to contend with the unyielding biases of their teachers and professors who present their opinions as fact? Those who would have us believe that the bias is initiated by students and works its way up to the hiring level where Conservative professors are systematically kept out of faculty positions are the same people who are implementing this institutionalized ideological discrimination in the first place. Karni also reported:

"Using national surveys that measured political party registration and ideological self-designation of faculty at 183 randomly selected four-year colleges and universities, researchers concluded that ideology had about a third as much impact as merit in determining the career success of socially conservative university professors.
"The trend is worrisome to many conservative scholars. "It hurts academia," a professor of Political Science at Villanova University, Robert Maranto, said. "It limits the questions we academics ask and the phenomenon we study, limiting the ideas which undergraduates are exposed to during their college education."

And the departments where we find the most disparities are those in which professors have the greatest opportunity to implement their political and social agendas and ideals. These are the humanities. Karni reported on this as well:

"In departments such as sociology and anthropology, "progressive" and "liberal" professors outnumber "conservative" and "libertarian" faculty members by a margin of at least 20 to 1, according to a new study by a husband and wife research team from George Mason University and the Swedish Institute for Social Research. The findings are based on dozens of national surveys about faculty voter behavior, policy views, and voter registration."

This was also found in a study Paul Kengor conducted in an issue of Policy Review examining the political affiliations of 190 social science and humanities professors at top Universities like Stanford and Cornell. He found that of those 190, 184 were self-proclaimed and/or registered Democrats and only 6 were Republicans. And this bias in professors then seeps down towards students. Kani added that:

"Some professors said a liberal bias is damaging the intellectual vitality of campus life, and they discourage conservative students from pursuing doctorate degrees in the humanities.
"If my students show conservative bias, I steer them away from the academy," a professor of English at the University of Virginia, Paul Cantor, said. "They have no future — they will not get jobs. If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today."
"Mr. Cantor, who is spending a semester at Harvard University teaching a course on Shakespeare and politics, said English departments were more intellectually diverse 50 years ago than they are today. Professors today may have broadened their syllabi, but most of them interpret those texts through the uniform lenses of race, class, and gender, he said."

Conservative students aren’t choosing to stay away from academia and conservative faculty members aren’t failing to qualify for positions. Instead, these faculty members are being held to higher standards by an increasingly discriminatory institution in order to suppress conservative and libertarian ideology and speech. And students are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the academy by self-serving leftists who hide behind the excuse that they are protecting these students from not having a job due to a system of discrimination that these same professors and their employers are creating and perpetuating.

In addition, students whose beliefs aren’t in line with the institution’s agenda are being further dissuaded through the process of obtaining an education, which often requires an adherence to the biases of their professors. Jason Dore of the Free Republic reported:

"Students detail how, time after time, professors introduce topics not included on the course description, squelch opposing opinions in discussion, misrepresent facts and encourage students to adopt the professor's point of view. A senior at UCSD detailed how he wrote a paper espousing a pro-life view that was picked apart. He rewrote it with a pro-choice stance and received an A.
"Cases of obvious bias are troubling enough, but when a teacher's opinion is taught as fact, students become indoctrinated without ever realizing they were taught lies. This often is the case in history classes when teachers present an unhistorical account of people or events.
"With the lack of accountability in the classroom and balance in teachers' views, how are students to trust the education they receive? Are they merely becoming indoctrinated members of the liberal left?"

Just this month, Richard. E. Redding of the LA Times wrote an article called, “It’s Diverse if You’re Liberal,” reporting on how “Conservative and Libertarian professors are becoming increasingly rare at colleges and universities, and this lack of diversity hampers the developments of innovative solutions to the nation’s problems.” He wrote:

"Last month, 18 million college students returned to school — to those hotbeds of debate about the crucial issues of the day, right? But not so fast. A major new study on the campus climate for viewpoint diversity — surveying 24,000 U.S. students and published by the American Assn. of University Professors — found otherwise.
"Only a third of college students felt that their professors made learning about different views a priority. In fact, most did not think it entirely safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus. Since more seniors felt this way than freshmen, it appears that the college experience makes students less comfortable about exploring and voicing diverse opinions.
"This lack of intellectual diversity at our nation's colleges and universities should be a concern to all of us. It means that our future leaders in industry, government and science are receiving a one-sided education (at an average cost of $75,000 to $155,000 for a degree) that leaves them ill-equipped, as the report explains, to work "across differences to tackle challenges and create solutions." "It also limits the phenomena studied, questions asked and solutions proposed by professors who, as the main producers of research and development in this country, fuel our innovative edge."

The left’s utilization of education as an ideological apparatus to mold the minds of students to fit their political agendas is not only unethical, but because they are paid with the money of taxpayers who believe that they are funding an open and free-thinking education system, it’s a direct violation of our American principles.

In the words of my personality psychology professor, who was teaching that a personality type characterized by discrimination and prejudice is associated with the right wing (despite the fact that it has only been tested for the far right and never the far left), those in academia tend to lean to the left themselves, so they wouldn’t be interested in looking for prejudice on the left. Despite admitting this, though, that same professor still included this assumed stereotype of prejudice against the right wing in the academic models we would be tested on in class. It didn’t matter that the research was done to find prejudice only in the right wing; he was still going to teach this idea about right-wingers as fact.

Too few studies have been conducted to expose this discrimination in the classroom and alienation of conservative students which contributes to blocking us from careers in the academy, largely due to the fact that leftists don’t find this to be a particularly “interesting” topic since it would prove the incidence of their use of our money to force their beliefs and propaganda onto students whose grades are subject to the successful reproduction of those opinions. This lack of checks on the leftists who have seized control of academia safely secures their ability to do as they please in the classroom, without any real consequences for overtly discriminating against conservative students. It also ensures that the only real proof of their doings lies in the experiences and anecdotes of college students, which are easily disregarded and ignored as simply being anecdotes.
With the discrimination that Republican, libertarian and conservative students have to face every day on campus as they try to simply get their grades and get out so that they can move into careers that will hopefully not punish them for their beliefs, does it really surprise anyone that there’s overt discrimination on campus as well?

The incident we saw at UMD was concerning, yes, but not just because it gives one party candidate an advantage over the other. The reason we should be concerned is that our public universities as a whole are suppressing free speech and targeting anyone who is not a leftist. Our country is seeing this pattern of blatant prejudice against a certain political ideology in our daily lives and experiences, but because it is being instrumented by ideological apparatuses like education and the media, students are feeling virtually powerless to expose it and even worse, virtually powerless to stop it now that it has been allowed to get this far.
What left-wing faculty create is a cycle. Left-wing bias keeps the right out of faculty positions, preventing the right from getting promotions. This in turn means that University policy, standards and fees allocations are controlled primarily and almost exclusively by members of the political left. It also means that classroom lectures, textbooks, discourse and grading are controlled by the left, which often leads to the indoctrination of students into those same views and the marginalization and alienation of those students who resist by daring to form differing opinions. Over the years, students with left-wing ideas are supported, encouraged and reinforced, while students with right-wing ideas are targeted for reform through the hostility of their peers, the expectations of their professors, and their vulnerability to subjective grading which has many students writing what the professor wants to hear, which also works psychologically to indoctrinate these students. Faculty discourage right-wing students from going into academia where they won’t find jobs due to this discrimination, which feeds into the cycle.

It’s time society stops excusing left-wing discrimination against conservative, libertarian and Republican citizens of society who pay just as much for their right to an education and deserve the same respect as both students and faculty as their left-wing counterparts.