Blogs > Liberty and Power > Faculty Political Bias Comes Home to Roost

Mar 12, 2004

Faculty Political Bias Comes Home to Roost


by Liberty and Power


Well, my earlier blogging on the classroom bias issue here and here, has come home to roost. My own campus has now made the national press on this topic. Today's WSJ has an opinion piece by John J. Miller on the topic that is hooked by an incident here where a junior faculty member went after the national college republicans in his blog (run on his own server using his own equipment, but accessible through a couple of links from the Sociology department web site) in terms that were, shall we say, less than flattering.

Miller's piece is the usual conservative complaint piece about left-wing faculty bias. My two complaints in turn are 1) he said nothing about the fact that several campus conservatives responded by putting up posters around campus calling the faculty member a "reverse racist." A number of faculty called for them to be punished for doing so including claiming it was a form of harassment, but the administration (of which I guess I am a part) has held very firmly to free speech on both sides of this issue; and 2) it misses the bigger picture here which is, as my own experience suggests, a place that is pretty friendly to out libertarians who are engaged in the world of ideas and campus life. I just hate seeing us lumped in with places where someone like me really wouldn't have been treated so well.

Another point to make here is that the faculty member at the center of this is the only hard-left faculty member on campus who has ever assigned an article of mine and then invited me to class to talk about it. In a 200-level class on the sociology of development last fall, he assigned a piece of mine defending free trade and then gave me a full 90 minutes of class to talk about it, with him present. It was a very civil and productive class. Is it possible to be an angry name-calling hater of college republican fascists in your blog, yet be open-minded enough to invite the opposition to class and treat conservative or libertarian students fairly? Good question. Interestingly, in the wake of some faculty email exchange on this incident in which I called attention to the faculty member having invited me to class, I now have two more invitations from leftist faculty to do guest lectures. I think this is a good thing, but I have jokingly suggested to my dean that I need to renegotiate my teaching load!

In any case, I'm just really sad this morning. I love this place and it's been very good to me and I hate to see a story that takes a very particular incident and uses it as part of a broader picture that simply doesn't so easily apply here.


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More Comments:

Steven Horwitz - 3/12/2004

Interesting question. I think my answer is "not very often if ever." One reason is that because this place is so teaching-oriented, much of our campus politics is centered around views of pedagogy and the classroom, and on those issues I tend to be with the majority (including much of the campus left). I've never *felt* tokenized. What's also interesting is that the program I now administer was created and run by, for many years, a group of pretty leftist faculty, and had a reputation for being fairly "PC," at least early on. I don't believe for a moment that my having got the job as associate dean had anything to do with changing that image (although it might well have had that effect). The reality was that I was the only faculty member insane enough to want to do this work. :)

King Banaian - 3/12/2004

I linked to this post. Steve, I have the same experiences here. My question to you is, to what extent do you feel like you are the "token libertarian" or "token Austrian" trotted out when someone wants to shield themselves against the claim of intellectual bigotry? I've had that happen to me a few times -- "Proposal X isn't biased because even King likes it!"