News Flash! Liberal Bias on Campus!
Linda Seebach has a regular column in the Rocky Mountain News, and her “bio” at the end of the column identifies her as an “editorial writer.” It follows that she has a conservative bias and it should be no surprise that her columns are a conduit for conservative propaganda. All you need to read is the headline and the by-line, which will tell you which of the set-piece conservative propaganda themes she will be talking about and what she is going to say about it. Today’s column was typical– “Hard data confirm liberals hold sway in higher ed.”
As we’ve said before, college faculties consist for the most part of intelligent, educated people who would be doing something else if they were greedy. It’s the nature of education that those who receive it and those who practice it are going to distance themselves from those who believe everything they are told or are prepared to take advantage of the less fortunate for their own personal gain.
Seebach’s column today was all about proving that the political imbalance exists. Since that has been stipulated, why dwell on it? It’s possible that Seebach is an unwitting propaganda vehicle, but it’s more likely that this is a deliberate exercise in the propaganda technique known as “pre-persuasion.” Seebach, other editorial writers, columnists, and “talking-heads” are creating a climate of opinion where colleges are left-wing political training schools with a political imbalance must be redressed. She’s helping to lay the groundwork for two starred items on the conservatives’ educational reform agenda:
Witch-hunts– the deliberate elimination, neutralization,
or otherwise shutting-up of anyone who dares to criticize the administration or conservative policies, and“Directed hiring–” another way of saying Affirmative Action,
a phrase that a conservative would have a lot of trouble
uttering in public since they are so thoroughly opposed to it
when it works in favor of minorities.
It starts with the first two words of the headline– “Hard data….” Seebach’s first paragraph reads “The latest study about political imbalance in college faculties should end the debate about whether it exists, and move along to the question of whether it matters, and if so what, if anything, should be done about it.”
Good one, Linda! You’ve implied that you have “hard data,” set up a straw man debate for the data to end, ascribed authority to the study, and implied that the now documented imbalance might “matter” and that perhaps something should be done about it. All in one sentence! In other words, she’s pretending that her “hard data” prove that a) it matters, and b) something should be done about it. We didn’t need “hard data” to prove that an imbalance exists, so the hard data’s relevance to whether the imbalance matters, and whether something could or should be done about it, is irrelevant. But propagandists tend not to let logic get in the way of a bit of rabble-rousing.
So, even though it means nothing, let’s take a look at Seebach’s “hard data.”
The “hard data” are taken from a paper which drew its numbers from a survey. The paper was published electronically via “the Forum,” one of the journals at Berkeley Electronic Press. This is not a peer-review journal, and as with most of the journals on BEPress, it is a cheap and easy way for academics to meet the requirements of the “publish or perish” rule. You can read it for yourself at BEPress, but why bother? We did, primarily to see why three scholars would bother trying to document something that is well known. Turns out they do indeed have an axe to grind, albeit a different one from Seebach’s. Their intent is to see whether ” …ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing.” They conclude that “conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats.” What’s more, they find “similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.”
Hmmm. Any educator, at any level of education, will tell you that the quality of a school is directly dependent upon and determined by the quality of its faculty. Seems reasonable to us that a higher quality school may have a higher quality faculty precisely because it has fewer conservative, Republican, or practicing Christian professors! What’s more, the authors have defined their own schools (Smith College, George Mason University, and the University of Toronto) as “lower quality.” We wonder if the opposite applies– Bob Jones and Brigham Young are not the brightest stars in the collegiate world, and, wait for it– you won’t find many liberals, Democrats, or non-Christians on either faculty. Talk about a political imbalance!
Let’s spare just a second to look at the labelling here– they’ve said that they are looking at political imbalance but find similar effects based on gender and religiosity. The three scholars then say “i.e., women and practicing Christians.” By using the specific “i.e.” (”that is”) rather than the general “e.g.” (”for example”), they have literally said that by gender and religiosity they mean “women and practicing Christians.” Not just any religion, and not just any Christians, but practicing Christians. “Practicing Christian” is now a political demographic, making up a substantial part of the conservative and Republican landscape. Women may indeed have some professional disadvantages in the academic world, but not because of liberal politics.
Now let’s turn our attention to the actual data, on which the Three Professors based their paper, on which Seebach based her article. The numbers come from a Canadian study conducted in 1999, i.e. before the great left/right schism in American politics and before anyone was concerned that the politics of the professor might affect the quality of the education. Seebach says that’s “quite recent, given how slowly the composition of most faculties changes,” but ignoring how quickly the political landscape can change, and then she says that the study “updates a roughly similar” study done in 1984. “Hard data” indeed.
Seebach’s lead paragraph said “The latest study….” Well, the “latest study,” turns out to be a recent “analysis” of old data, with a view to supporting the poor analysts’ self-delusion that they might have enjoyed careers at better schools if they had been liberals. And Seebach uses it cold-heartedly to further the cause of silencing dissent and getting highly- paid professorships for her conservative cronies. Watch for that soon– we might have to endure a little more pre-persuasion, but eventually we’ll see a Seebach piece that begins “Now that it’s been proven….”
–SG
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