Gib asked me to post up some personal stories of leftist bias in academia. These stories are all from my experiences with the Philosophy department.
1.) In my Environmental Ethics course, when we’d take a test there was always a question of the following sort: “Defend or criticize the practice of X using our course readings.” Where X would be something like factory farming, nuclear power, genetically modified food, or what have you. Sounds like an objective question- you can answer it either way you want. The problem, of course, is that you have to use the readings, and there were never any readings defending the practice in question. So if you wanted to defend nuclear power, say, you couldn’t complete the assignment.
2.) I have a friend that took the Marxism course. We were talking about it one day over lunch, and he was tell me about Chairman Mao and all the great ideas he had, and how the Little Red Book really opened his eyes to some stuff. I asked him about the Great Leap Forward, Thousand Flowers Campaign, stuff like that. My friend had no idea what I was talking about. Turns out, the Marxism course has a two-weeks section on Mao that doesn’t even mention what happened when he got into power.
3). I was in a Philosophy of Religion course. Really, we didn’t learn much philosophy of religion. We learned what a couple sociologists say about religion, and then the rest of it was a ‘ethics’ course- we’d read a paper against nuclear power, or against war, or in favor of racial reforms or whatever, but because the author was a nun or a minister or whatever, it qualified a Philosophy of Religion, I guess. The format of the class was, 3-4 people would assigned to lead the class presentation on the previous week’s reading, with the professor providing a few clarifying comments at the end. One week in particular, the subject was some guy criticizing Catholic just war theory. Catholic Just War theory has several criteria that must all be met for a war to be considered just, that involve the reasons it is fought, and how it is fought. The author went through the list and refuted each criteria by showing how a war could be clearly unjust despite meeting that criteria. What he failed to take into account is that all the criteria have to be present, so criticizing them individually in such a way is meaningless. He also criticized Just War theory on the grounds that it turns “Thou Shalt Not Kill” from absolute imperative into a matter of subjective interpretation. I pointed out in class that this can’t be a valid criticism because that commandment has been a matter of interpretation from the beginning- the very first thing Moses did after presenting the 10 commandments is have a bunch of people killed for worshipping the golden calf.
So anyway, I made these points in class, expecting that some more liberal classmates would disagree, because why not? That was just my take on the reading. But there wasn’t much commentary. At the end of the class, the professor stood up to make his comments as usual, but instead of commenting on the reading, he commented on me- spent those 10 minutes (felt like more) talking about how if people aren’t going to read attentively, they shouldn’t be commenting in class at all, and on and on and on. Now, the class discussion was light enough that it could only be me he was talking about. So, after being berated for 10 minutes for expressing an opinion he didn’t like, I didn’t participate in his class anymore. I showed up, but insstead of asking questions and giving opinions, I just had my nose stuck in my laptop through the lectures. This was a small class, a 101 class where most people were not interested. So without me, there basically was no class discussion. After two lectures of people awkwardly sitting around not commenting at all, theprofessor eventually recanted his early comments, declaring to ‘the class’ that he hadnt meant to stifle discussion altogether. After that, I resumed participating as normal.
4.) This same professor was a member of MPAC- Maine Peace Action Committe or some shit like that. Peace protest organizers. A friend of mine who was also a member at the time told me that during the above incident, the professor told MPAC all about me- what a barbarian I was, and how people like me had no business studying philosophy in the first place.
5.) This was also about the time I was told by a Political Science advisor that I didn’t have much of a chance as a philosophy professor, because I wasn’t a woman or a minority.
6.) I remember being told, by my ethics professor back in my freshman year that we were going to skip the chapter on gay rights and homosexuality, because the issue was settled and there was no longer any controversy to discuss. This was the same year that in Maine, the state in which she was teaching, a gay marriage bill was struck down by popular vote. So, she considered an issue non-controversial when, not only was it controversial, but her side of the issue was the minority.
7.) I had many courses on political philosophy- the philosophy department was based around political philosophy, that was sort of the focus of the longest-serving professors. Despite that focus, Edmund Burke was never mentioned, not even to be criticized. Not even in the vast, rambling sections on Rousseau. No conservative writer was ever mentioned in class. No MacIntyre, no Sowell, no Hayek, no Montesquieu. No Kirk, no Goldwater, no Chesterton. When I mentioned one of these people, none of my professors had ever read any of them, with the exception of MacIntyre.
8.) When I revealed, in my senior year, that I was considering working for a political thinktank instead of being a philosophy teacher, my advisor was upset. By this time, it was no secret that I was a conservative. He expressed concern that I wouldn’t really want ‘people with political motives’ to ‘exploit my intellect in that way’. He was saying this to me in his office, which was littered with flyers and other advertisments for the various leftist political organizations he was a supporter or member of. There was no illusion- if he knew I was going to be joining organizations he approved of, he never would have made a comment like that.
There’s lots of others. It was a purely leftist-democrat political advocacy environment. Anyone that wasn’t on board with that was made to feel an outsider, made to feel (if not outright told) that they had chosen the wrong major. The treatment I recieved there was a big part in ‘radicalizing’ me- I’m a much more outspoken opponent of leftist politics now than I ever was before college. Five years of seeing how they act when they have power, or when they think there’s not a conservative in the room to criticize, will do that.
