Word: biases
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...many students can attest, liberal bias is not a neutral element. It makes itself quite clear in the classroom. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently published a survey of the nation’s top schools showing that 46 percent of students think professors “use the classroom to present their personal political views;” seventy-four percent say professors make positive comments about liberals, and 47 percent think they make negative comments about conservatives...
...course, there will always be some element of bias in a course, because a professor’s very method of teaching, his approach to the material is informed by his political sensibilities. Each professor’s fundamental assumptions about government, values and morality will in some way necessarily be built into any course they teach...
...fact that a degree of bias is inevitable, and for that matter healthy, makes it all the more important that there be a full range of political views represented on a school’s faculty. The greatest crime of having a nearly uniformly liberal faculty is not that conservative students feel challenged or uncomfortable; it is that liberal students are all too comfortable. The majority opinion is not only endorsed and bolstered by the politically lopsided faculty, it is practically taken for granted. In this atmosphere, where liberal students see their views constantly vindicated by the highest figures...
...reverse this trend, more voices need to be heard. As in almost all aspects of free discourse and exchange, the way to limit the undue influence of one dominant group isn’t to try in vain to limit its free speech or innate bias, but to make sure that there is ample competition from other competing groups with their own biases...
...Bias is a problem at Harvard and throughout academia, but not one without remedy. Overt bias must be kept to a minimum, but if universities are to allow a healthy amount of political bias in their classes, they must embrace and seek intellectual and political diversity much more rigorously than it has in the past. For if diversity is truly held to be a valuable goal in the makeup of a faculty, schools must consider the hiring of more conservative professors an important part of that commitment. Only in this context can bias cease to be the problem and become...