slowguy wrote:
Slowman wrote:
NCtri wrote:
ThisIsIt wrote:
BarryP wrote:
JSA may have a point. Its kind of like why we have a BET, or a black history month, or a Jewish community center, etc. They generally exist for minority groups who aren't well represented in the mainstream.
If the college campus is overwhelmingly liberal (is it? i don't know), then it would make sense to have "conservative space," but not specifically liberal space.
How does one determine such a thing?
It isn't a thing. I've taught at 3 different universities, all large publics. Institutions like that are generally not liberal or conservative, but portions of the faculty are both. Arts and social sciences lean left, business/hard sciences/medicine are pretty moderate, and you will not find a large contingent of highly conservative faculty anywhere. But they do exist, I have several business school colleagues that are holy roller Trump supporters.
To my mind a public institution should be totally secular. You don't discourage or encourage religion. People that want religion in schools always want it to be THEIR religion. With a private institution it should be totally up to the institution as long as they don't discriminate on some basis. Can't discriminate and get federal funds.
I never mention religion or politics in class. I teach information systems and analytics so there is no place for it in class.
i always kind of scratch my head at this. higher education - all education really - is where physics and math and chemistry is taught. you cannot advance medicine or engineering if you don't live inside the world of hard science. a miracle is, even by biblical standards, the suspension of physical law. it's an outside agent deciding to override the very set of physical laws he established. these physical laws are every bit as holy or reverence-worthy as the suspension of them.
so we teach physical law and we either do, or we don't, believe that an outside agent can override them at his choosing. either way, it's at his choosing. we can't teach the exception to the rule. we have to teach the rule.
so, because higher education teaches
the rule, it naturally attracts those who live by, and are wedded to, the rule. they are obliged to omit the exceptions to the rule, outside agency, or any religious implications associated with the rule. they are obliged to withstand the pressure - which they certainly feel - to admit a discussion of anything not physically provable. even in the humanities, the foundation of a professor's education is science based.
i don't know that universities are liberal, as in, there's a liberal deep state in higher education. rather, they're secular, i.e., they teach according to physical law rather than the suspension of it. what do we expect will emanate from an institution that is built entirely around honoring only physical law? why does this shock and offend? do you really want to go to a doctor, or drive over a bridge designed by an engineer, who is trained in some other way?
It's certainly true that the teaching of physics, math, business, etc tend towards the secular. But the OP's issue wasn't secular v religious. It was liberal v conservative. There are a significant number of college/university faculty who give voice to fairly strident liberal political and ideological positions, there are large portions of student bodies at some schools that shout down any conservative voice, and there would seem to be a general academic bent toward the liberal end of the political spectrum.
if you simply limit yourself to what you see in the physical world, homo sapiens isn't valued higher than another species. it just is another species. only religion values homo sapiens higher. it's only via a religious decision that a homo sapiens zygote is extrapolated into a fully formed, fully sentient entity deserving of the value religious folks attach to homo sapiens.
if you just take this small slice, right there, this extrapolates into all sorts of political differences between folk. you can extract consequences from just the natural history of mammals that result in highly charged reactions from, say, fundamentalist/evangelical christians, which result in, "what are they teaching in school these days?" this makes its way into conservative ideology because of the very deep and strong nexus between conservatives and christians.
fine, you might say, but how does this explain a more liberal take on sociology? or history? same sorta thing, really. once you parse american jingoism from actual U.S. history conservatives pretty easily identify the "america haters". but historians really are just "american truthers".
trump conservatives are now singing a different tune, of course. conservatives decried the anti-war crowd during vietnam, and for a couple of generations afterward. now, tho, when liberals are asking why trump is the way he is, we're hearing from trumpists how america is just as guilty as [russia, or fill in the blank] because of all the shitty stuff america did throughout the last century. trumpists are now using historic fact (or some facsimile of it), but a generation ago liberals who used historic fact were commies.
the remarkably consistent group, throughout all of this, are the academics that attach themselves to fact, to science, whether in education, in the national academies, and wherever fact and logic and science are imperatives.
conservatives made the decision to go after the religious minded. they were successful. liberals got the fact-based crowd as a consolation prize. so, if you wonder why there are more liberals in places that are fact-based; why more college-educated people are liberals; and so forth; i don't know that this is so hard to figure out.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman