A colleague called my attention to this interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jon Shields and Yuval Avnur: “Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias.” A few thoughts below the fold. I am very sympathetic to the concerns the piece raises: to wit, that humanities and social sciences courses tend to teach big controversies with a strong leftward bias. I also think it is imperative to be self-critical and transparent about these things, not to lay off because of the attacks on academia. Our most important asset is scrupulous honesty.
(I do really wish people would actually spend more than five minutes with Foucault’s texts before caricaturing his oeuvre; to say that Foucault “reduced all Western societies to intricate and oppressive systems of social control” is to reveal a thorough lack of understanding of the theory.) But beyond that: it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to cite one’s own “study” in the WSJ and link, then, to an unpublished manuscript hosted on one’s own Google Drive. I admire the chutzpah, so read the study carefully.
Continue reading “ideological diversity on syllabi”
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