The brouhaha last week at UCLA over the Bruin Alumni Association prompted the LA Times' to devote most of its editorial section today to the question of whether universities are biased ideologically. Granted, the BAA's UCLAProfs.com site undermined its credibility by mixing apples and oranges, as I pointed out:
If BAA is going to go forward, a question on which I am firmly agnostic, I should think that they want to avoid violating IP law and university policy respecting copyright and so on. I should think they also need to draw a distinction between in-class abuse of position and legitimate political expression outside of class. So far, it would seem, they are falling down on both scores.
Put bluntly, however, the claims by the defenders of the status quo are even more bogus as the BAA's criticisms.
UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi claims that:
A method for assessing how professors treat their students is already built into how universities work. Every course at UCLA gives students the opportunity to anonymously evaluate their professors, and those evaluations are used in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions; abusive professors don't get very far in their careers.
Institute for Advanced Study Professor Joan Scott apparently got the same set of talking points:
... there are abuse-monitoring mechanisms in academia that distinguish between responsible work and polemic, between teaching that aims to unsettle received opinion and teaching that seeks to indoctrinate. Universities have established procedures to adjudicate complaints of indoctrination, charges of unfair grading and other denials of student rights, and, for the most part, they work.
Neither Makdisi nor Scott offers empirical support for their claims, although the latter claims that "study after study," none identified, validates her argument.
In contrast, I offer you some data. First, as explained in the preceding post, university hiring practices have a demonstrable disparate impact on the political and ideological composition of university faculties. Second, as I noted in my TCS column, these disparities clearly have a deleterious effect on the learning environment. A survey of students at 50 top U.S. universities and colleges conducted by the Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut, for example, found considerable evidence that politics pervaded the classroom:
For instance, nearly half said that their professors frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course or use the classroom to present their personal political views. In answers to other questions, the majority acknowledged that liberal views predominate. Most troubling, however, were the responses to the survey item On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade -- 29% agreed.
I don't know whether Makdisi and Scott are simply uninformed or are being disingenuous. I do know that the system is broken and that public scrutiny of how universities spend taxpayer dollars is both appropriate and inevitable. The academic left's knee-jerk effort to delegitimize such scrutiny by invoking labels like witch hunt or McCarthyism will be as bootless as they are duplicitous.
