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Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

nytimes.com

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Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#41

Post by jchanimal »

weberc2 wrote: post #24
jchanimal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s the old canard where conservatives don’t realize that the reason their viewpoints are not represented on campus is because they don’t hold up to intellectual scrutiny.

Is this true across the board? I can think of a handful of popular tropes where this is true, like climate change skepticism, but even this comes in degrees ranging from conservatives who agree that climate change is real and needs action to those who agree it's real but are skeptical about the long term consequences to those who think that climate change is real but not man-made to those who think it's not real at a…

Ok I’ll bite. Another unsubstantiated conservative canard: taxes are bad. When in fact highly redistributive polices are correlated with all-boats-rising economic tides. “But who cares if we are all worse off, taxes are theft,” whines the conservative. Cry me a river, it was always already the government’s money.

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#42

Post by josefresco »

creaghpatr wrote: post #34
josefresco wrote: post #17

politically lopsided When the fuck did equal rights for minorities, women, and GLBTQ become "politically lopsided". We're talking about human rights here. There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate. This article is concern trolling 101.

>There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate. This is a perfect example of the problem, no intellectual capability to refute, resulting in a desperate resort to bigotry.

There's no intellectual argument to refute. Just the conservative trope "my opinions are being oppressed!" then when you ask about their conservative principles it basically boils down to justifying their racism/sexism or their own bigotry.

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#43

Post by tiglionabbit »

sebular wrote: post #37

It's impossible to take this author and article seriously when he opens by describing "justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people" as being "politically lopsided".

The author whines about progressive events existing without conservative events. He never describes what sort of conservative events he would want to see.

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#45

Post by jeffdavis »

josefresco wrote: post #17

politically lopsided When the fuck did equal rights for minorities, women, and GLBTQ become "politically lopsided". We're talking about human rights here. There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate. This article is concern trolling 101.

Even among liberal-minded people, the politics and culture presented at colleges is exceedingly narrow.

Regardless, colleges should deal with bad ideas by acknowledging and refuting them, not pretending they don't exist.

I have a theory that people born after about 1980 don't really understand bigotry they just know there are certain things they can't say and certain things they should say. That leaves them ignorant of the root causes and it can manifest in other forms and not be recognized as bigotry.

Much better to have open intellectual discussion than to pretend bad ideas don't exist.

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#46

Post by tiglionabbit »

friedman23 wrote: post #13
jchanimal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s the old canard where conservatives don’t realize that the reason their viewpoints are not represented on campus is because they don’t hold up to intellectual scrutiny.

Are you using the argument that because current conservative policy is to deny the existence of man made climate change that every other conservative position is unscientific?

Well, what defensible prepositions have ya got?

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#47

Post by iaosfgnionio »

I've never been sure whether or not this is a problem. Academics are not a representative cross-section of the American people, so there's no real reason to expect their political opinions to be representative.

I would argue that professors should know better than the general public. In that case, we should want to see true beliefs over-represented and false ones under-represented. So-called liberal and conservative beliefs are often mutually exclusive. That means that at most one of them can be true. Wouldn't that suggest that, if academics are doing their job of finding the truth, they should be biased? If professors were half liberal and half conservative, that means that at least 50% of them are wrong.

If liberal beliefs are true, this bias might be what we want. If they're false, of course, then it clearly isn't.

Or maybe not. Professors and administrators are responsible for teaching. There is certainly an argument to be made that a diversity of viewpoints is useful. Informed and well-reasoned positions might be useful for education even if half of them are wrong. And a spirited debate among peers could help everyone learn and come closer to the truth.

If the bias were the other way, with 90% of administrators being conservatives, would this author be saying the same things? Would I be saying the same things? I think the answer to both is "probably not." Or, if we said the same things, we'd definitely feel differently about them.

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#48

Post by tiglionabbit »

viggity wrote: post #20
mklarmann wrote: post #4

Tell me again. What is his issue?

that the only diversity that administrators care about is diversity of (largely) indelible characteristics (skin color, sexual orientation, etc), instead of diversity of thought. I'd much rather go to a school where everyone looked the same but thought different, than a school where everyone looked different but thought the same.

He complains about some events. He doesn't propose alternative events. What sort of events would exist if the administrators were more conservative?

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#49

Post by sebular »

viggity wrote: post #20
mklarmann wrote: post #4

Tell me again. What is his issue?

that the only diversity that administrators care about is diversity of (largely) indelible characteristics (skin color, sexual orientation, etc), instead of diversity of thought. I'd much rather go to a school where everyone looked the same but thought different, than a school where everyone looked different but thought the same.

You contradict yourself. You imagine a school where everyone looks the same but thinks "different", and yet by your own definition that school doesn't have any women, blacks, gays, etc. How would that work? Do you imagine an academy of straight white men, some of which serve as delegates for the types of thought that emerge from groups that aren't allowed to attend?

Your line of reasoning is the perfect example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

"Why are you tolerant people so intolerant of my desire for a world without all this tolerance? I thought you hypocrites were tolerant!!"

Re: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

#50

Post by Uhhrrr »

sebular wrote: post #37

It's impossible to take this author and article seriously when he opens by describing "justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people" as being "politically lopsided".

It does seem ridiculous. Devil's advocate, it may be that he is so immersed in campus culture that he assumes everyone knows that "justice" is code for illiberal leftist ideas like the progressive stack and forced equity.
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