Diversity of Everything but Thought

Did I miss the post showing the facts that disputed the opinion peice?

The Center generated a list of 32 elite colleges and universities. We included the entire Ivy League, premier liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Pomona, well-known technically-oriented universities like MIT, highly competitive public institutions like the University of California at Berkeley, and other elite private universities like Stanford. We compiled lists of tenured or tenure-track professors of the Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology departments - choosing these because they teach courses focusing on issues affecting the society at large. We compared these lists to the voter registration lists of the counties or states in which the colleges were located, and attempted to match individual names.

Show me Freeduck. The only one who even tried was Cyclop and he only challenged Williams' list of 'bird courses' and the rebuttal he came up with was laced with faulty facts. One other post--not Dys's--came up with some data that showed a lot of professors are registered independents but otherwise strongly supported the case for liberal bias. So, what we're left with are the A2K liberals saying they just don't believe it's a problem and the A2K conservatives saying there is plenty of evidence that there is.

College costs have risen dramatically over the last several decades. In many cases, it's difficult to find a college where per-student costs are under $20,000 each year. Most often, tuition doesn't measure the true cost because taxpayer and donor subsidies pay part of the expenses. While costs are rising, education quality is in precipitous decline, particularly at the undergraduate level. Part of the reason is the political climate on college campuses, where professors use their classrooms for proselytizing and indoctrination and teach classes that have little or no academic content. Let's look at some of it.

That strong campus leftist bias goes a long way to explain mindless university courses like: "Canine Cultural Studies" (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "I Like Ike, But I Love Lucy" (Harvard), "History of Electronic Dance Music" (UCLA), "Rock and Roll" (University of Massachusetts) and "Hip-Hop: Beats, Rhyme and Culture" (George Mason University). There are many other examples documented by Accuracy in Academia.

In a study to be published in Academic Questions, sociologist Charlotta Stern and economist Daniel Klein found in a random national sample of 1,678 university professors that Democratic professors outnumber Republican professors 3 to 1 in economics, 28 to 1 in sociology, and 30 to 1 in anthropology. As George Will said in his Washington Post column, "Academia, Stuck to the Left" (Nov. 28, 2004): "Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations."

A Zogby survey was commissioned by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to compare the general cultural knowledge of today's college seniors to that of yesteryear's high school graduates. The questions for the survey were drawn from those asked by the Gallup organization in 1955 covering literature, music, science, geography and history. The results were reported in a NAS publication titled "Today's College Students and Yesteryear's High School Grads." It concludes that "Contemporary college seniors scored on average little or no higher than the high-school graduates of a half-century ago on a battery of 15 questions assessing general cultural knowledge."


A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, given to a representative sample of 700 college seniors, found that 25 percent did not know that Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before the year 1500, 42 percent could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century, and 31 percent thought Reconstruction came after World War II.


In 1993, a Department of Education survey found that, among college graduates, 50 percent of whites and more than 80 percent of blacks couldn't state in writing the argument made in a newspaper column or use a bus schedule to get on the right bus, 56 percent could not calculate the right tip, 57 percent could not figure out how much change they should get back after putting down $3 to pay for a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich, and over 90 percent could not use a calculator to find the cost of carpeting a room. But not to worry. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's 1999 survey of seniors at the nation's top 55 liberal arts colleges and universities found that 98 percent could identify rap artist Snoop Doggy Dogg and Beavis and Butt-Head, but only 34 percent knew George Washington was the general at the battle of Yorktown.


Americans as donors and taxpayers have been exceedingly generous to our universities. Given our universities' gross betrayal of trust, Americans should rethink their generosity as well as rethink who serves on boards of trustees that, in dereliction of duty, permit universities to become hotbeds of political activism and academic fraud. There are a few universities where there's still integrity and academic honesty, and they don't cost an arm and a leg. Among them are: Grove City College, Pa., Hillsdale College, Mich., Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, and others listed at the Web page of Young America's Foundation.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's 1999 survey of seniors at the nation's top 55 liberal arts colleges and universities found that 98 percent could identify rap artist Snoop Doggy Dogg and Beavis and Butt-Head, but only 34 percent knew George Washington was the general at the battle of Yorktown.

The thesis dear Cyclop is 1) modern colleges have excessively liberal faculty and 2) modern education is woefully lacking.

<snip>
I know from my own experience of looking at hundreds of resumes and job applications from todays 'graduates', education is largely not happening out there.
<snip>

The thesis dear Cyclop is 1) modern colleges have excessively liberal faculty and 2) modern education is woefully lacking. That is your correlation.

You don't agree with it and that is fine. The thesis is we need more balance to have better education. You don't agree with that and that is fine. But you can't dispute the studies,

you haven't proved Williams was wrong about those 'bird courses'--the prospectus for the course won't do it

--he has the PhD and you don't--

and I know from my own experience of looking at hundreds of resumes and job applications from todays 'graduates', education is largely not happening out there.

Well, apart from the scientific study soon to be published that you agree is not anecdotal

But I will give you an A for at least a reasoned rebuttal this time Cyclop. Good work there.