How Liberal is the Academy?
Very, but not always as much as it might seem. Most of the faculty I've encountered tend to be at the left wing of the political spectrum, but I haven't really noticed it affect the way they teach course content. There is, however, a tendency among college-age conservatives to develop a sort of bunker mentality in which everything that challenges their values or their way of thinking is part of a grand conspiracy by the left wing education establishment. This is perhaps warranted on some campuses, but I haven't found it to be consistently the case in Williamsburg. I thought I would defend my characterization of the atmosphere among both the student body and the faculty as being "liberal, but too busy to care."
In my experience here, there hasn't really been much in the way of left-wing hackery on the part of the faculty. I do remember having one professor who insisted that Obamacare wasn't at all radical, but he at least seemed to enjoy engaging with the conservative students rather than calling them ill-informed idiots. He seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. Any left-wing bias there is appears in the form not too far removed from the bias that naturally slips in due to anyone's personal inclination, and I have sensed no attempts at deliberate distortion of the facts. As a demonstration, here are a few of the things taught here.
French Colonial History: The Indians (yes, they use the term) were killing each other long before the arrival of Europeans.
Mining in the Western Hemisphere: The supposedly egalitarian American labor movement worked hard to exclude ethnic minorities from jobs.
American History - 1763-1787: The American colonies had the freest political systems of any societies in the western world, except for arguably the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation.
Southern Politics: Jim Crow was installed and defended by Democrats. Southern realignment began before the Southern Strategy, and was strongly influenced by social and economic influences apart from the Civil Rights movement.
Intro to Modern Political Theory: Rousseau's philosophy is necessarily totalitarian.
Now, W&M is hardly a hotbed of right wing academics by any stretch of the imagination. I merely wish to demonstrate that dissent, while perhaps not considered "the highest form of patriotism," is not openly suppressed in the classroom. I have heard some horror stories, and have been personally subjected to Ray Raphael's People's History of the American Revolution, which has been sanctified by Howard Zinn himself. (Zinn’s book itself, as far as I know, is not assigned here.) I am only trying to show that the faculty here, even if they happen to be knee-jerk leftists, are not hell-bent on expounding on The World According to Liberals 101. Sure, you encounter references to “patriarchy” and social constructivist theories of this, that and the other, but the professors I have encountered generally care more that there are students interested in the subjects they teach than about quashing opposing viewpoints. I, of course, can only speak of my own experience. I know not what lies outside Virginia’s colonial capital.
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Re: How Liberal is the Academy?
I took a government class in which we read from the book 'Bo: America's Commander in Leash'. I have also taken classes from a professor who said he has voted Republican his whole life and worked for Dubya's staff.
Every professor will carry a political bias, but you have to be a special kind of nutjob to have that overshadow your goal to educate students. It certainly happens, but if a student disagrees with their professor in a respectful manner, I imagine a large majority of professors welcome the discussion as opposed to kids just sucking up and pretending to agree.
Re: How Liberal is the Academy?
Professors take their job very seriously, especially at a college where teaching is their primary reason to exist. My most left-wing professor, an avowed socialist, is my BA thesis adviser and is going to be writing me a recommendation for grad school. He loved that I was both his best student and the only vocal social conservative he's taught in years. The fact that he is a methodologist and is interested in public opinion basically meant that whenever we talked about liberal vs. conservative breakdowns of opinion on a variety of issues he would check in with me to make sure he was "getting conservatives" right.
Even at UChicago, a school that does have a sizable conservative/libertarian faculty contingency, the overwhelming intellectual center of the faculty is supremely left wing. I just remember the controversy that broke out due to our dedication of the Milton Friedman Institute a few years back; I've assiduously avoided the professors that signed the letter opposing its creation. But I've never really heard of any professors taking it out on students because of their ideological predilections.