About to head to college in two weeks. I hear a lot of discussion online about how uni professors are all in the very far left (and very open about expressing their political beliefs), but I was wondering if all that talk is an exaggeration. Would love to hear any stories.
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It’s actually true. Especially if you are entering liberal arts.
Except for the lone hold out of rational thought - the University of Chicago - the rest have gone into la-la land....the venerable U of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom saw this coming decades ago in his seminal work "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987)
Honestly I witnessed it myself on a few occasions. One time in particular stood out to me:
A liberal muslim homosexual ACLU lawyer professor and abortion doctor was teaching a class on Karl Marx, known atheist
”Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Marx and accept that he was the most highly-evolved being the world has ever known, even greater than Jesus Christ!”
At this moment, a brave, patriotic, pro-life Navy SEAL champion who had served 1500 tours of duty and understood the necessity of war and fully supported all military decision made by the United States stood up and held up a rock.
”How old is this rock, pinhead?”
The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly and smugly replied “4.6 billion years, you stupid Christian”
”Wrong. It’s been 5,000 years since God created it. If it was 4.6 billion years old and evolution, as you say, is real… then it should be an animal now”
The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Origin of the Species. He stormed out of the room crying those liberal crocodile tears. The same tears liberals cry for the “poor” (who today live in such luxury that most own refrigerators) when they jealously try to claw justly earned wealth from the deserving job creators. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, DeShawn Washington, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than a sophist liberal professor. He wished so much that he had a gun to shoot himself from embarrassment, but he himself had petitioned against them!
The students applauded and all registered Republican that day and accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. An eagle named “Small Government” flew into the room and perched atop the American Flag and shed a tear on the chalk. The pledge of allegiance was read several times, and God himself showed up and enacted a flat tax rate across the country.
The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He died of the gay plague AIDS and was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity.
Semper Fi.
10/10
I imagined a thundering rendition of "America the Beautiful" performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ringing out as the eagle swoops in...
Left wing leaning faculty come with the territory when many of the faculty know they are being out earned by their uppity little sh*t undergraduates soon after they graduate, this is especially true at the Ivy Leagues.
11/10
Dank post
MARSOC Raider
I read it as him describing a Navy SEAL as a Marine.
Guess I'll just have to brace myself haha. Doesn't help that the student body I'm attending is very liberal (think Berkeley/NYU/Brown) but at least I'm going into finance/economics. Do these professors tend to actually give lower grades for students having "controversial" ideas from your experience?
Finance/economics professors tend to lean much further to the right than the rest of academia. YMMV.
No. Anyone who tells you otherwise is legitimately retarded. Good work is good work. I lean left, but have had super far right professors as well as far left professors (west coast non target) and grading disparity had far more to do with my own effort than any sort of perceived difference in political views.
1) Just don't be an idiot and write something you know your professor will disagree with. 2) It won't kill you to be around people who disagree with you politically. Keep an open mind, you're in your most formative years (I entered undergrad a hardcore Fox News conservadrone and now I vote for the candidates the Democratic Party won't support for being too liberal). Some people will be militant about their beliefs; pay them no mind. A lot more will be reasonable and worth a conversation. 3) I have a lib arts degree and never once felt like a professor was forcing any beliefs upon me. Never heard anything from friends that would suggest they had such an experience either. YMMV but people like to exaggerate.
My college professor cried in class after Trump got elected. I would second what the guy above said. Just write stuff that are politically correct for the next 4 years and you will be fine.
I'd say you're more likely to take some social dings in school from the general student body at the more "Liberal" institutions, than from your professors. Sure maybe your philosophy 100 professor might be a little weird, and your anthro/sociology prof may espouse some views you don't agree with, but just don't be the 18yo freshman who has open air debates in your class of 300+ classes and you'll be straight. Probably best to leave the MAGA hat at home if you swing that way (but honestly if you're donning the red cap I think you already know what comes with that territory). Other than that focus on knocking out your GenEds as quickly as possible in your first 1.5-2 years, crush some brews, make some friends, get freaky with the sex of your choosing (but always suit up), and most of all, enjoy it! after all you're paying for it!
Idk if this is some Northeast/ Cali phenomenon but I didn't even think about the political leanings of my professors when I was in school. Sure they might make a statement here or there that would hint at where they stood politically but it was never a deal.
It isn't a phenomenon anywhere except in the minds of the people who it threatens. Nobody talks about this. I spent 4+ years in school, never heard a peep of any of it. Go in, listen to boring lecture for 50 minutes, do the homework, end of story. Join a frat, get trashed, join clubs, get trashed more. It's so simple only certain people could possible fuck it up thinking about politics.
Best post on this thread.
I have butt heads with several professors over ideology, entirely in core classes, never a business/finance class. Its a good exercise in defending your view points in a respectful way. Other than that, it won't kill you to hear about other people's experiences and what makes them lean to the left.
Universities are overrun by the typical case of ''those who can't do, thus teach''. This should have become obvious after the LCTM debacle of ''muh Nobel prizes'' in the 90s, instead Western societies bailed out the idiots, and then elevated even bigger charlatans to the rank of creators of truth because they are ''the experts''.
When it comes to humanities and social science, they are vastly populated by envious Marxists, who sucked at any valuable job whatsoever, decided that Western societies were ''White supremacist'' and ''patriarchal'' as an explanation for their personal worthlessness, thus to correct that they would ''educate'' the minds of the youth to their ideals so that the glorious utopian society then can finally happen once everyone agrees with the greateness of the socialist model. Under that aspect, the US is completely and irreversebly fucked. You'd need to train from scratch a new generation of educators who don't adhere to Marxist ideals, but you can't because the motto of the Left is indeed ''get them when they are young'' thus the field of primary education is even more polluted by these people.
Too bad because she was a hot Russian leggy type but I can't deal with that bullshit.
"...that the problems actually lie in violent police..."
Isn't the entire BLM platform basically based on the idea that police are violent? Am I missing something?
Their narrative is that evil white cops are killing innocent black kids in droves. That's blatantly false. If they were a movement against generic police violence, they'd be right and I'd support them, however their name and talking points are all race based, negated by statistical evidence.
So generic police violence is a statistically supported and valid phenomenon but police violence against black kids is a false narrative and "negated by statistical evidence."
Pls help me understand and reconcile.
P.S. I think BLM is a joke
Their assertion of the causation if the problem. They claim that the police is specifically trageting black kids BECAUSE of their race. That's simply not true.
I think the argument is that black people, and most glaringly children, are the victims of police brutality in numbers that make it statistically highly improbably that it is coincidence. The BLM message, as I understand it at its core, is that American police are taught, consciously or subconsciously, that black people are inherently more threatening or likely to commit violent crime than white people. That, coupled with the increasing militarization of the police in general, means that black people are vastly more likely to be the victim of police brutality than white people.
Pretty much every study on crime ever done supports the notion that the American justice system treats blacks and Latinos significantly more harshly than white people. That isn't even up for dispute any more. Which means that police brutality in general is more likely to be directed at blacks than at whites... so I'm not exactly sure why you disagree with the BLM movement, when you more or less agree that what they're protesting is a legitimate issue.
Is it a coincidence? Clearly not. Let's also say you are a policeman that operates in that specific neighborhood. Let's say you come from a relatively peaceful one hence have no pre-conceived experience against criminals. The first time you stop someone for a routine control, he reacts violently you get beaten up. The second time you get a minor wound. The third you get shot, non-lethal. Is it fair to say you become wary of dealing with criminals from that area? Unless you want to die, then you'll become extremely careful and to the very least prone to defend yourself. Note that at no point whatsoever I brought race into this until now, because all of the above would happen even if everyone was white or purple. Once the distrust between the community and the police is created, it's really hard to rebuild it. In the US it has been dynamited and quite frankly BLM and its anti-cop narrative made it worse.
“The BLM message, as I understand it at its core, is that American police are taught, consciously or subconsciously, that black people are inherently more threatening or likely to commit violent crime than white people.”
The “threatening” part of this comment is moreso based on individual perception, so I’ll set that aside. If your comparison is simply black vs. white, then yes, statistically, black individuals commit violent crime at rates vastly disproportionate to their population size (i.e., at much higher per capita rates than white individuals).
Also, I’d like to know: How do you teach something “subconsciously”? Sounds like some lucrative new-age Jedi Mind shit; gimme the inside scoop, my dude.
“Pretty much every study on crime ever done supports the notion that the American justice system treats blacks and Latinos significantly more harshly than white people.”
What? Provide one study which definitively proves, ALL else being equal (i.e., the ONLY differentiating factor is skin color), that blacks and latinos are allotted harsher punishments than whites.
“Which means that police brutality in general is more likely to be directed at blacks than at whites...”
Where’s your evidence for this non-sequitur?
This exactly.
Encountered two leftist prof during my freshman year. Both British. One is a fan of ANTIFA, the other one gave a student 20/100 presentation mark because he said we should be skeptical about global warming data (median mark was 80/100).
Sad. I'd have given him 0/100, but I guess that's where the world is today.
Lmao. This is the type of commentary I come to WSO for.
Intellectuals in general tend to be very left of center these days (folks with a college degree strongly correlate to voting Democrat), because the right wing is pretty openly anti-science, so any place in which you're expected to think critically is likely to be "left of center", especially in the US, which orients center-right in general.
That being said, the random horror story aside, there is a vanishingly small chance that your political views impact your educational experience. If you are the asshole standing up in class and making a point of martyring yourself (and people of all beliefs do this), then yeah, you're likely to suffer. But again, only people who actively try and victimize themselves find themselves being put upon.
Long story short, defend whatever you believe quietly and effectively and don't make an ass of yourself and you'll be fine. Anyone, professor or student, who won't engage you on the merits of the facts of what you believe isn't someone worth knowing/learning from, anyway.
''Gender is a social construct and there are 37 of them in total'' but the right is anti-science.
Now, I won't be dishonest, the climate change skepticism hasn't done favours for the Right's relations with the academia. To the very least because STEM fields tend to be more (a lot) respectable and trustworthy. I'm not a fan of evolution negationists either.
However this doesn't excuse the abysimal state of the social science in the US academia, which is entirely to blame on the Left.
If you argue points objectively as opposed to hollering down your echo chamber, a college professor should be intelligent enough to mark your work based on its quality versus its political value.
Here's my anecdotal experience. Take it as a data point.
I studied economics and had a professor, who was also the chairman of the department and my personal academic adviser, that was a Marxist/Post-Keynesian. He published many articles and books on Marxian monetary/capital theory and was very well known in that community.
I am not a Marxist. You could classify me as an Austro-Libertarian (extreme right wing in terms of economics). I wrote many papers that were highly critical of government interventionism and of socialism in general. I challenged him frequently in class, in front of other students (when appropriate).
I graduated with a 4.0 GPA, summa cum laude and received a fantastic letter of recommendation from him.
Here's my two cents: academics generally do not penalize well thought-out, reasoned and well articulated arguments, even if they disagree with the general premise. Often students will present garbage work and shit arguments and attribute their poor grades to bias. You see this quite often with very conservative students. They confuse politics with science/reason, get a bad grade and then blame the "liberal professor."
I'm not saying that there isn't bias, but I didn't really see it in my experience and I went to a liberal school. I imagine it's probably different in the humanities with trans professors, purple hair, etc.
Anyways, pick a real major, submit quality, well-reasoned work and I doubt you'll have a problem.
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