Jane Shaw of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has written a very interesting column about an online college course on government taught here in North Carolina. Her analysis shows a clear leftist bias in the material. Here is an example of what she found.
Week 7, Public Opinion and Participation, included three websites under the category “Politics in Action.” One was Democracy North Carolina, which promotes public finance of electoral campaigns. What about the argument against public financing? Not here.
Another was MoveOn.Org the organization created by billionaire George Soros that uses political action to counter “a political process where big money and corporate lobbyists wield far too much influence.” The third was an article from the Progressive magazine, “Bullies at the Voting Booth, 2004.” The instructor’s description of this article was “Republican dirty tricks,” and, indeed, the article warned that “Republicans may use a variety of tactics to suppress the vote of racial minorities in swing states.”
The academic reading for the week, which had been presented at the 2013 meeting of the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, was not partisan, although of dubious value. The paper studied whether the “Twitter political chatter” surrounding the 2011 Republican primary debates reflected national polling data (it didn’t).
“Online readings are selected to provoke discussion. I find most of the discussion from students tends to be from a conservative direction, not that [that] should be of your concern. I think students have the intellectual capacity to make their own analyses. To avoid biasing online discussion, I do not make online comments for this very reason and discussion from students is broad-ranging from all points of view, though I do think conservative comments predominate. I have used explicitly conservative sources, such as Cato Institute, in the past, though I do not select extra readings on that basis. I have not had students comment on bias in the past many years of my teaching this course.”
I take the professor at his word. There are many reasons a student would not comment to a professor who fails to offer a broad range of perspectives for discussion and analysis.
Of equal concern to me are parents. A university professor once told me he is amazed that the vast majority of parents of college kids simply, as he put it, drop their kids off at the beginning of freshman year and then pick them up at graduation, and rarely ask questions or inquire about anything other than where to send the tuition check.
There is much more to Jane’s piece, and I encourage you to read it in its entirety. If we expect students to engage in critical thinking skills, we must also expect that universities function as marketplaces of ideas.
