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Tuesday, March 29, 2005
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LOOK, IT’S OKAY WITH UD… …if people get all het up about monolithic liberalism on American college campuses. As an English professor (“The most left-leaning departments,” writes Howard Kurtz today in the Washington Post, about the latest study of the subject, “are those devoted to the humanities [81 percent],” and “the most left-leaning [among those] departments are English literature, philosophy…”), she has certainly had her fill of lefties 24/7. It’s even possible that with unrelenting publicity and pressure over the next decade or so, UD could in her lifetime encounter a teensy range of political opinion at American universities. But I’m not holding my breath. Here are the numbers that jump out at UD: 33 percent of the general public describe themselves as conservative, and 18 percent as liberal. Whereas. 72 percent of university and college teachers are liberal and 15 percent conservative. When UD reads stories like Kurtz’s, when she contemplates numbers like these, she gets this sudden image of the few remaining self-described liberals in the country huddled together like Ellis Islanders in the hull of a rusty boat, the boat being the American university… But this is altogether the wrong image. Many American universities (certainly UD’s) are glamorous yachts. The university is not merely one of the few asylums where liberals can be comfortably among their own; it is almost certainly the most stylish and attractive of escapes. (Hollywood isn’t a significant option, being too small and closed a world.) UD skews liberal for the purposes of the study about which Kurtz is writing. “The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights [yup]; believe homosexuality is acceptable [acceptable? I think we can do better than that], and want more environmental protections ‘even if it raises prices or costs jobs.’ [UD is an enviro-freak].” But on international politics UD looks much more conservative than her colleagues, and it’s too bad that it’s pointless for her to open a conversation about this anywhere on campus. Except with her students, of course. They’re far more conservative than any of us. |