Does college make you a liberal?

Quote:

And yet the very fact that a high-school student approaching college comes to us with such a question is rather telling in itself.

Blatham adds more anecdotal evidence (his and Ican's experiences) but that doesn't mean that the poster's concerns are without foundation. She didn't pluck that question out of thin air.

JW...here's a primary mistake you make, of the "where there is rumor of smoke, there is surely evidence a fire probably blazed"

We've seen posters come onto this board who were convinced that 9-11 had been initiated by Israel's Mossad. They referred to accounts found on web pages or in newsletters which claimed that Jewish people had been forewarned, and were not present in the towers that morning. They used terms such as 'evidence'. They suggested that there would be no reason for these accounts to be 'all over the internet' unless there was something to them.

Why could we not reword your sentence above as follows?

"He didn't pluck that information out of thin air."

Who says her fears are founded on rumor? Has she stated that? I certainly didn't use that word.

How is it that you so willingly discount any and all anecdotal evidence in the other thread, yet bring your own to this thread and offer it as proof that she will most likely encounter no liberal bias on any college campus because you didn't?

John Leo is a contributing editor for U.S.News & World Report, and his column on the state of our culture appears weekly in 140 newspapers across the country. Leo has covered the social sciences and intellectual trends for Time magazine and the New York Times.

Quote:

Who says her fears are founded on rumor? Has she stated that? I certainly didn't use that word.

How is it that you so willingly discount any and all anecdotal evidence in the other thread, yet bring your own to this thread and offer it as proof that she will most likely encounter no liberal bias on any college campus because you didn't?

Neither I nor anyone else (so far heard from) in this rather large community of users who have been to university. How odd that should be the case.

But you miss the point. You suggest her initial question is 'telling'. Is it? What does it 'tell'? Your obvious suggestion is that there must be, or is likely to be, or may be, something real reflected in the simple fact she asks it.

But of course, on such an evidentiary basis, we can make only the mildest of those assertions ('may be') with any credibility. And we can make that 'maybe' assertion about Mossad involvement in 9-11 too. As stupid as it would be.

Freeduck, I'm not sure what it is you think I'm "backing away" from. I did go back and read the first few pages, which is what lead me to post what I did today.

I'm not sure she read the other thread, although I pointed it out to her on page 1. Somewhere around page 3 or 4, blatham asked her about how she came to ask the question, although I haven't yet seen a response. We still don't know exactly how she came to form her opinions.

Blatham,

I don't think you can make the case that most universities are not - in both the professorial and administrative ranks - numerically and actually dominated by a substantially larger fraction of people who identify themselves as "liberal" than exists in the country as a whole. There is lots of evidence to confirm that, and there is a real basis for one of a libertarian bent to be concerned about the controls imposed on behavior in the name of the various doctrines of the priesthood of political correctitude.

However, I would agree that it doesn't matter very much. University is like a cafeteria and one learns from the various offerings. I can recall several wonderful professors who taught me a good deal about engineering and science, but I would trust very few of them with the management of one of our major projects.