A Higher Education Lesson from the Nobels
This year, in all but literature and peace, United States researchers took home the Nobel. From economics, to physics, to medicine, to chemistry, US researchers are bar none the best in the world. This is on top of the Times Higher Education Supplement that ranks US universities as the best in the world. Why then, do conservatives complain of liberal indoctrination?
A key thing to notice is that the only “soft” academic field in the Nobels is for literature, a prize an American hasn’t won since 1993 (Toni Morrison). This should hardly come as a surprise as American “culture” is saturated with insipid nudity and mindless entertainment.
However, something deeper is also true. While academics may be left-ward tilting in academia, in the “practical” fields those biases rarely come into play (if they exist). Is there a conservative or liberal way of looking at cosmic background radiation? The bias is prevalent in the “soft” sciences and liberal arts. No economist worth his salt seriously debates that socialism works, they all on some level or another accept the free market. The conservatives have all but won the fight in economics.
In engineering and business schools, the students are cultured into achieving results. It is in the liberal arts schools where a majority of students end up where the curriculum can be bent and tilted any which way. The entire field of sociology has bought into the liberal agenda leaving students without exposure to any other trains of thought. Thus all our sociological experts, whom we turn to for advice on sociological issues, have a narrow-minded view of the world.
It is in these soft sciences where liberal bias is most damaging, particularly when it shuts down any dissent. Instead of presenting all points of view and engaging in a “war of ideas”, students are indoctrinated into one train of thought without any ability to engage in any serious debate. The same can be said of philosophy departments, some political science departments, some history departments, and the myriad of “culture-based” departments.
The result is a political culture that is unable to look at the world around itself and pigeon-holes itself into firmly held doctrines and unquestioned ideas. Bias here is the most damaging to society.
John Bambenek is the Assistant Politics Editor for Blogcritics and is an academic professional for the University of Illinois. He is a columnist for the Daily Illini and blogs at Part-Time Pundit deep from the corn fields of Illinois.
He is the current owner of BlogSoldiers, a blog-only traffic exchange.
John Bambenek is the Assistant Politics Editor for Blogcritics and is an academic professional for the University of Illinois. He is a freelance columnist who blogs at Part-Time Pundit and the executive director of The Tumaini Foundation which helps AIDS orphans and other children in Tanzania to get an education. He is the current owner of BlogSoldiers, a blog-only traffic exchange. | More from John Bambenek
Stumble It!
October 13th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Feminist critics of mainstream cosmology and
astrophysics have noted its “obsession” with
violence: that it studies the big bang,
gravitational collapse and stellar explosions,
gamma ray (out)bursts, etc. Ideology informed,
`feminist science’ would somehow `correct’ or
improve on this, they say.
Some formerly hard branches—such as sub-nuclear
particle physics—have for various reasons
succumbed and are now in a deplorably decadent,
degenerate state.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:31 am
After many years in industry I became a prof at a university. I am stunned at how far to the left the faculty are. Even and especially in the “B” school. Economists slamming tax cuts. Management profs praising unions and harping on sweat shops. Business profs who sneer at the profit motive. I have never encountered a more out of touch group as the faculty members on this and other campuses. Most have the maturity and the world view of an eigth grader.
October 16th, 2006 at 2:12 am
Eighth Grade, Snowman? Dreadful. How dare the reactionary right still retain grades. Everyone from 5 to 25 should recieve the same level of indoctrination. The lefties are on track. If only they could get rid of these pesky, demeaning ‘grades’.