Faculty identify selves as "liberal," by a wide margin
Howard Kurtz reports in The Washington Post:
College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.
By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.
"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."
[...]
"In general," says Lichter, who also heads the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, "even broad-minded people gravitate toward other people like themselves. That's why you need diversity, not just of race and gender but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective."
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
29 Mar 2005 @ 6:51pm
Columbia's president speaks out
In a speech on Wednesday night, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger discussed academic freedom and classroom indoctrination. The speech contained some reassuring words; it remains to be seen whether the words will lead to any action.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
25 Mar 2005 @ 5:55pm
Lots-o-cops
For the last few weeks, we've been traveling around the country extensively while we gather the remaining footage for the feature-length follow-up to Brainwashing 101. This has made it difficult to keep up with e-mail and postings to this site, but the good news is that we've been capturing some tremendously compelling stories. We've also had more than our share of run-ins with the police at various campuses. Asking certain questions of university administrators makes them very uncomfortable; they don't seem to want certain dirty laundry to be aired. Who knew?
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
25 Mar 2005 @ 4:26pm
Harvard faculty vote "No Confidence" on Summers
The Arts and Sciences faculty of Harvard University passed a no confidence referendum on university president Larry Summers. The vote was seen as a rebuke of Summers' controversial remarks on women in science.
It is odd that the faculty--which presumably has an interest in seeing academic freedom remain intact--would try to shove Larry Summers out the door over controversial remarks. Right now, faculty from all over the country are defending Ward Churchill on the grounds that his dismissal would erode academic freedom. But if comparing the September 11th dead to Nazis is defended in academia, why aren't academics also coming to the defense of Summers?
We defended Churchill's academic freedom here on this site, not because we agree with him, but because we understand the danger that occurs when freedom of speech and thought are not respected. While it is true that a university president is in a slightly different position than a tenured faculty member, we would like to think that academic freedom protects everyone in academia, not just those who've managed to get through the tenure process. It is a dangerous precedent to set when a community creates a privileged class that enjoys rights not afforded to anyone else. Faculty who argue for their own academic freedom do themselves a disservice when they undermine the same freedoms for everyone else in academia.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
15 Mar 2005 @ 10:43pm
Columbia accepting Saudi financing
As University of North Carolina faculty members petition the school to reject funding from what they describe as "a conservative philanthropic foundation," The New York Sun reports that Columbia University isn't quite as picky about where its funding comes from. The school has been quietly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from interests in the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil company of Saudi Arabia:
In the past two years, Columbia has come under greater public pressure to disclose its foreign donations, especially from governments suspected of supporting Islamic terrorism.
The New York Sun reported last year that Columbia had failed for years to disclose to the federal Department of Education the foreign gifts it received.
[...]
Among the 22 foreign gifts of $250,000 or more that Columbia disclosed having received in 2003 was a contribution of $250,000 from an unnamed Saudi individual for "social science research."
Among the donors of the $2.1 million Edward Said chair, Columbia reported, were the United Arab Emirates, which gave $200,000, and the Olayan Charitable Trust, a charity associated with a Saudi-based multinational corporation, the Olayan Group.
Saudi Aramco, which the Saudi government purchased from American oil companies in 1980, gives grant money to a number of other Middle Eastern programs at American universities.
In 2003, the oil company's in-house journal, Saudi Aramco World, ran a 6,000-word article on the importance of Middle East centers in helping policy-makers understand the region after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The article did not mention criticism that Middle Eastern studies has received from lawmakers and some scholars, who argue that the academic field has been corrupted by scholars who oppose America's foreign policy, particularly its friendly terms with Israel, and who gloss over Islamic terrorism.
A research associate at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Martin Kramer, who has been a vocal critic of Middle Eastern studies in America, said the Saudi kingdom is a logical benefactor of the institute.
"If you're a Saudi, it's very convenient for Rashid Khalidi to claim that the source of America's problems in the region is not their special relationship with Saudi Arabia, but their special relationship with Israel," Mr. Kramer said. "All he has to do is say it's Palestine, stupid."
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
11 Mar 2005 @ 9:01pm
UNC faculty members oppose additional funding
71 members of the University of North Carolina's faculty are opposing a plan that would funnel between "$600,000 to $700,000 a year range over several years" to the university for a new "Studies in Western Cultures" program. The reason? The faculty members don't like the source of the money: "a conservative philanthropic foundation."
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
10 Mar 2005 @ 12:40pm
Terrorists welcomed at University of Illinois
Two former members of the Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist organization responsible for a string of bombings around the U.S. in the 1970s, are now lecturing at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). The Weather Underground sought to overthrow the government of the United States, landing at least one member, Bernardine Dohrn, on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" list. Dohrn and husband Bill Ayers, who was also a Weather Underground member, were invited to the University of Illinois to participate in the school's guest-in-residence program.
Posted by webmaster
2 Mar 2005 @ 9:53pm
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