Free Speech is the Enemy

It's not in any way nonsensical if you truly believe that all higher education is intentionally, liberally biased. As a conservative consumer, you should be able to point to where knowledge and this bias intersect, then demand a product that removes that bias or replaces that bias with something you'd identify as conservative.

I don't have to define what conservative higher education is because:
A) I do not believe there to be this overarching, inherent bias in all higher education that you purport.
B) I can already point to both extremely liberal and extremely conservative institutions

 

Defining it is easy...do not add opinion to fact based curriculum. Identify opinion as opinion.

Seriously Chino, my daughter graduates in May. I know from conversations with her that, the professors expect you to regurgitate exactly what they teach. Much of what they teach is opinion and they do not welcome dissent, even in subjects where dissent SHOULD be part of the process.

 

Those that can't do...









yes I know there are exceptions. Not many.

 

You invented the term so you'll have to define it.
If you can't, we default to the nonsensical question evaluation.

 

You can't make an institutional problem out of a few bad apples, isn't that the response to use for things like this - not aimed at you, just the dungeon.

I'm assuming you didn't do anything to change this though because either your daughter, overall, believed this to be her best education, or, you felt like there is absolutely no recourse afforded to you as a consumer with buyers remorse. Tenure is a big issue to the point Mongo made about people being so far removed from the real world, but there are also schools who demand all professors remain active in their respective fields.

It's sort of the same question I had when bars were "demanded by the public to be smoke free"...shouldn't there be someone making an absolute fortune with a smoke free bar?

 

Lots of places reported losses after the smoking ban, supply and demand. Same as with the profs, there would be little reward with challaging the prof’s leftism; recognized the bias, write the reports to feed his ego, get a passing grade and move on.

 

Catholic schools and not much else.

 

To a bigger question, wouldn't a republic or a democracy be the height of stoooopid (hey G) liberal progressivism in the days of monarchy and divine rule? What was conservative is now passé is kind of the story of human progress, no? It's always easy to point at the extreme professors and the hardened old timers fighting change and blame both depending on your perspective - but what is the inherent nature of our expanding knowledge? On the surface, what is new is almost always linked with being progressive/liberal until it's not.

 

This was prevalent at both Georgia Southern and University of South Carolina - ColUmbia. It isn't so much a matter of buyers remorse ad the way the curriculae are structured. You don't always have options...there are prescribed courses. Those courses have prerequisites, and there may only be one or two sections that fit in with her other course schedules. If she misses a prerequisite, it means summer school or another semester. Those have very distinct cost implications. Freedom of thought, which was one of the wonderful things about college when I attended, seems to have become just another anachronism.

And BTW, her science classes were often taught by English as a third or fourth language professors that were EXTREMELY difficult to understand. I think there was either a shortage of tenured english speaking professors or they had gone the "let the grad students do the teaching" route.

 

It may be, it shouldn't.

 

Even so, what is conservative and what is conservative in respects to education? I went to a catholic university in the late 90's and most all of the Marianist Brothers and general professors outwardly supported gay rights at that time with stickers on their office door or whatever. That was definitely not the stance of the Vatican at that time and is still a danced around subject even by this "liberal" Pope. I think many "conservatives" would argue my catholic school was very liberal and many southern evangelicals would laugh and ask what else you'd expect from Catholics.

 

This has been studied several times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_bias_in_academia

 

I think people place way to much stock in the big name evangelicals. They are not as influential as their recognition might suggest.

 

With just reading the info in that link, the larger gap isn't liberal vs conservative, it's democrat vs republican. Each one of those studies highlighted in there show over 40% of respondents (57% in the original study) identifying as conservative or moderate. Those numbers haven't changed that significantly over time, but the percentage of registered republicans is abysmal at every point.

 

Meh, liberalism in higher education is what it is. I don’t have any direct skin in the game other than the long term ill effects it’s creating with the current younger generation. Secretly, I’m hoping it becomes even more liberal to a point that the good American people will finally wake up and come to their senses and realize that higher education is becoming / is a sham and discontinue to support it both with dollars and enrolling their kids - resulting in the stoopid imploding on itself. I have a dream. .

 

This has been my experience with both of my daughters as well. One goes to a large public college in Texas and the other goes to a small private college in PA so it isn't like the 2 schools are similar. Friends with recently graduated kids or kids in college say the same thing we are about the schools.

 

Well according to some, we have no clue what we are talking about. I guess our first hand information is deficient.

 

You just don't appreciate the new education paradigm. When you were in school, there were a lot of unknowns and thus you were taught to question and to weigh the variables and consider different opinions in an effort to form your own opinion.
That's all been dispensed with since they now have all the answers and students merely need to be told what the correct answers are.
Discussing incorrect answers would be counter-productive and unfair to the students.