Warner Todd Huston in his “The GOP cannot win until…” is absolutely correct. Education is the key. And there is no doubt about the indoctrination by the Left, which actually starts in K-12 and continues through the University. I will argue that the key to the success of the left-indoctrination may also be the key to counteract it.
The left indoctrination (be it in our current universities or in any Marxist strategy of any time and place) works by distorting the truth. The left is unencumbered by the eight commandment. In the Marxist ideology the ends justifies the means. The strategy of distorting the truth in schools and the media has always worked very well for the left. Unlike Europe, and especially Eastern Europe, Americans have little experience of this Marxist strategy. They don’t see that plain distortion of the truth is at work everywhere in the education enterprise, whether it is by biasing textbooks in K-12, rewriting history, ignoring economic facts, or misrepresenting the embryonic stem cell research potential.
The AAAP (American Association of University Professors) has recently sanctioned that the pursuit of the objective truth is not anymore the goal of a university department. The accepted truth is what the department decides it is. This is now written in their charter. So, for example, if the Women Studies department declares that women have been oppressed because of capitalism, that is the truth about the condition of women.
But a University’s mission is the pursuit of the Truth. Thus, to counter the continuing invasion of the left in academia, an essential (and probably effective) strategy is to insist on zero tolerance for distortions of facts and contest each and every claim unsupported by rigorous evidence. We protest when the media distort facts about Sarah Palin. But we don’t protest when university professors distort facts about so many things. We must start doing so.
A possible place to start contesting the increasing amount of truth distortions present in Universities is from the Science and Engineering departments. They are the most concerned with and sensitive to the truth. I would not start with Physics and Mathematics because, although they would certainly see the importance of the truth issue, they are already too much left leaning. Engineering is better. Many engineering students don’t have a strong interest in society and so they have not have had a chance to be indoctrinated. The trouble with them is that they have little time and inclination to devote to university policy. But they could be helped; especially by using social networking and other internet-methods that would make it easy and not time consuming for them to voice their intolerance for truth distortions. They spend all their time in front of computer and it would be easy for them to support a cause just by clicking here and there every once in a while.
Once the movement of protesting for a return to the mission of the University to searching for the Truth gets going, many idealistic students who now fall for the left would embrace this ‘rid-us-from-the-liars ’ movement. For example, if they convinced themselves that ‘professors lied when they said that Bush lied’ it is likely that they, being idealistic, would turn against the original liars.
I Posted This In Warner's Diary, I'll Post It Here Too For Thoroughnes
baseketball Saturday, December 20th at 5:44PM EST (link)I’m not convinced that colleges really “convert” anybody, if only because as a college student I have a lot of trouble imagining any of my fellow students listening to anything that their professors tell them anyway. Granted, as a mathematics student I’m not as exposed to political speeches from my professors, but I’ve sat through discussions in freshman politics class some years back, and pretty much all of them are liberals anyway. I think we might put too much stock in what comes out of universities, and not enough into looking at what goes into them.
Let’s face it, anybody with a passion for “gender studies” is probably a liberal. Chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others who study “applied” sciences are more likely to be not very religious, if only because in their daily life, they are instructed constantly to never believe anything without empirical evidence. Psychologists, sociologists, social workers? They want to “help” people. Is it any surprise that they think the government should be involved in the helping?
In short, I don’t think the problem is that universities take our moderate, conservative, and apathetic young people and turn them into liberals, I think it’s that most of the people who go to college are liberals in the first place. Throughout the ages, “liberal” has been pretty much the default political position for those just coming of age. I’ve found that the “real world” often conservatizes them.
So why a higher instance of liberalness among college students? Well, they don’t go straight into the workforce. They don’t pay as many taxes (at my school, you don’t pay sales tax, and any paycheck you get from the school isn’t subject to income tax). Their encounter with the “real world” is delayed. But give them time, the real world has a nasty way of creeping up on you when you least expect it. Who knows, maybe 75% of my generation will grow up to be flaming liberals who will take over the country. But frankly, I don’t think it’s all that likely.
Somewhat true
Menlo Sunday, December 21st at 2:18AM EST (link)I strongly believe most of the students who turn into liberals during college do so because of their peers and friends rather than because of teachers or staff. I don’t suspect it’s a tax issue either. I was conservative long before I ever paid taxes, and the people who make the most money seem to support liberalism, big government, and big taxes.
Regardless, I’m sure many start out as liberals given the ideological leanings of high school graduates who don’t attend college aren’t all that different.
As for scientists, I don’t think not being religious should lead one away from conservatism. That’s an unfortunate stigma falsely created by the left that the GOP must work to eliminate. The problem you’d likely run into with most scientists is that conservatives don’t (or shouldn’t) want the government to force other people to change their lives or habits on the basis of all their new theories and research. In fact, we want those theories to flourish to encourage legitimate economic growth. Their true problem may be that conservatives want scientists to earn their money and their credibility.
I notice you didn’t mention law school, probably the most dangerous place where liberalism and “miseducation” is rampant. In this case, I’m betting there may be a correlation.
However, there is the issue of public schools. I haven’t had much personal experience since I haven’t attended one in twelve years, and that was only up to the eighth grade. However, it is obvious they have been and still are failing to make students learn basic biology, history, grammar and writing.
“Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.” -Ann Coulter
You may be an exception
GB221 Saturday, December 20th at 9:33PM EST (link)Your views are interesting but in my experience rather unusual. Maybe because you are an unusual person being a student in mathematics and contributing to a political blog. Anyway, you say that
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as a college student I have a lot of trouble imagining any of my fellow students listening to anything that their professors tell them anyway
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This is often the case of undergraduates, but graduate students, especially in the humanities and social sciences, must and indeed generally do follow very closely the indoctrination of their advisors and of the department. They would not survive otherwise. [There is an interesting article by Joseph Epstein in the Weekly Standard touching on this situation ('Obama's good students’ 12/08/2008)].
But my point is that, regardless of whether one believes that professors are effective in indoctrinating students, the universities have betrayed their mission by allowing truth distortions to go unchecked and in fact welcoming them provided they help pushing the liberal agenda. To this, all students who take their education seriously should rebel. You are in mathematics. If your professors maintained that real numbers are countable, would you assent quietly or would you think that something very wrong in going on ?