< PREVIOUS ] [ 1987 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Now that school is starting, we'll probably see more conservative complaints about the liberal political bias of the faculty at the University of Colorado. I don't recall all the particulars, but last spring, various scandalmongers charged that the university employed at least a dozen Democratic professors for every Republican pedagogue.
Thus deprived of political balance in the classroom, students who might otherwise have preserved their wholesome homegrown conservatism would somehow become flaming liberals by the time they were graduated.
Even if you think Ollie North walks on water, it makes more sense to worry about being hit by a meteorite or how to spend the lottery jackpot.
For one thing, there appears to be a reverse connection between the political beliefs of one's educators and the political beliefs one espouses after leaving school.
If we assume that the situation at CU is neither new nor unique -- that is, that for many years, most educators at most universities have been of the liberal Democratic persuasion -- then how do we explain the fact that survey after survey shows that college graduates tend to vote more conservatively than the population at large?
Further, I doubt that any generation had a more conservative education than mine did, in the public schools of the 1950's and early 1960's. Mccarthyism was still a potent political force. We were taught to fear communist influence in every spot from the pulpit to the playground. We saw movies depicting the Diem regime of South Vietnam as noble, honest, democratic and worth our lives to defend. We heard lurid lectures concerning the horrors of reefers and various alkaloids.
What generation produced the SDS and Weathermen? Which one vociferously, often violently, protested the war in Vietnam? In what age group were drugs of all sorts exceedingly popular?
Obviously, American conservatives ought to rejoice every time they hear of a school with an overwhelmingly left-wing faculty, because that is the surest way to produce a flock of right-wing graduates.
There is another reason why you don't encounter many Republican professors at CU. If you truly believed in the conservative principle that the private sector works better than the public sector, you would teach at a private institution. You'd be a total hypocrite to derive your livelihood from a state-supported university.
Conservatives argue that you should be rewarded in proportion to your competence. That makes perfect sense, but that's not how colleges work. Professors get their rewards -- pay raises, promotions, tenure, etc. -- on the basis of seniority and publication of meaningless articles in unread (and unreadable) academic journals, not by how well they teach their students.
A Republican university professor who took his job seriously and thought it was important would encounter another problem in Colorado. He'd want to see his institution excel, and he'd like to increase his own salary. Both take money. However, our Republican legislature has arranged matters so that Colorado ranks 47th of the 50 states in per-student spending on higher education.
The Republican professor might argue that Colorado could do better. But then he'd start sounding like a Democrat. Suddenly, there's yet another pernicious liberal at large on campus.
Not that any young radicals will result from this. Now as ever, students are a rebellious lot. If most of their teachers say that communism and drugs are bad, they'll wave red flags and accept candy from friendly strangers. If their professors wear jeans and sandals to class while denouncing capitalist exploitation, then clean-cut graduates emerge in coats and ties, skirts and nylons; they take up junk bonds, power lunches and Republicanism.
If Colorado's conservatives had thought this through, they'd quit whining and begin demanding that CU start recruiting its faculty from the University of Leningrad.
AN APOLOGY: Last week, I mentioned people in line for Grateful Dead tickets. They were in Montrose, not Delta. Perhaps the powerful holistic right-brain planetary vibrations from the Harmonic Convergence damaged my sequential left-brain memory.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1987 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >