Posted by
KWG on Tuesday, June 03, 2008 10:30:00 AM
I'm a big fan of Stanley Fish and his blog on NYTimes.com.
Sure, he's definitely a lefty, but he's articulate and reasonable without
resorting to typical extremity of any opinion.
His column of May 25 (I missed it at the time due to
Memorial Day) is unfortunate. Fish is peeved by the story that the University of Colorado is considering a program in
order to more advertise and air conservative views on its campus. UC is doing
this to combat the (very) widespread perception that it's a very left-leaning
campus.
Fish disputes the notion that it's left-leaning, raising the
point that the university, as a body itself, doesn't take any official
positions on any political topic. A legitimate point, but totally irrelevant to
the conversation here.
The Fish argument rests on this line of logic: even though
only about 2% of the faculty are registered Republicans, this shouldn't reflect
the actual teaching that goes on in the classroom, because academic teaching is
not concerned with convincing students of certain arguments, only teaching them
the basics, including their intellectual histories and subsequent traditions.
He then enunciates the problem here: even if this were a
problem, the way to address it is not to create a new program to teach
conservative thought, it's to hire better teachers who don't instill their
political views into the classroom.
I agree on the solution that he poses. The problem, however,
is far different than he says. Fish, being a professor himself, may be acting
on his own biases. He could be a great professor, he could be the professor
that he idealizes, teaching only the facts without a personal bias. It is
unfortunately very rare to get a professor of that kind.
Fish also laments the purely anecdotal nature of complaints
of classroom bias. Though he's correct in this, it doesn't mean those
complaints are irrelevant.
For instance, the best philosophy professor I ever had was
incredibly biased. He was a great teacher, and used a very balanced curriculum
with interesting sources, but made no attempt to hide his own philosophic love
for liberal political philosopher John Rawls. Imagine the situation that a
student is placed in this situation, even if the professor is a perfectly fair
and balanced grader.
Armed with this knowledge, what is a student to do? Even if
the student loves Rawls' philosophic opponent Robert Nozick, perhaps the
student will be more influenced to study and praise Rawls, knowing the teacher
will agree with the student and that it may, in some small unconscious way, be
easier to argue with the teacher's own opinion than against it.
In my own experience (sorry Fish, anecdote) I only ever had
one professor who hid (or tried) to hide political views. An econ professor did
his damnedest to hide his own views from the class, and was fairly successful
at it. At the end of the semester, he had the class take a vote on what they
thought his views were, and the class split roughly 50-50 on
conservative-liberal.
Fish is right that, in an ideal world, political views of a
professor wouldn't matter. We are far, far away from an ideal world. Professor
bias creeps into the classroom almost no matter what, and it could be that this
is absolutely inevitable. The solution is a combination of hiring professors
who strive for an unbiased classroom and setting a course curriculum that
emphasizes opposing views of political thought.
Bias in the classroom is, unfortunately, a problem. Though I
may not agree with UColorado's drastic decision to spend a lot of money to
balance the debate, there is definitely a problem that pervades classrooms the
country over.