Some people, including scholars, are dismissing research that shows that universities or newsrooms or people in other professions are biased in favor of leftwing ideology. But Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education, no less, points out that the research that shows liberal bias if of exactly the same kind, uses the same methods, and holds the same assumptions as the research done by liberals that has shown racial and gender bias:
Along with the empirical research, the contributors also raise numerous points about the general ideological climate and commitment on campus. One of them throws the question of proof back upon people who say, “Show us the proof that conservatives are being discriminated against?”
As we know, one of the primary positions in discussions of discrimination today is “disparate outcomes.” The argument says that if a body such as a police force, an entering freshman class, country club members, etc. has a disporportionately low representation of any identity group, then discrimination is at work. It may not operate on the surface, and it may not happen through the actions of any particular individual, but the fact that, say, only 3 percent of the group is African American reveals bias.
What about the disparate-outcomes argument in ideological cases, then? If a college faculty has only an eight-percent conservatives make-up, doesn’t that call for an investigation, a committee, a task force? It certainly happens when other identity groups are under-represented.
Another defense says, “Well, sure, most profs lean to the left, but that doesn’t mean they bring their politics into the classroom.”
But this claim runs against thinking in the humanities that has dominated for 50 years. It says that political and ideological commitments run deep, that they are often unconscious, that the assumption that we are able to suspend them is an Englightenment myth, that “the political” is everywhere, that buried idelogical premises shape so many things we take for granted that we don’t realize their workings.
That last paragraph is the key. Those who hold the postmodernist assumption that everything is political cannot exempt themselves from their own worldview!
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Have these people never read the three Humanist Manifestos? After reading them, my public high school education made perfect sense. Those educators weren’t consciously selling the ideology–it was how they were trained. These documents have shaped our society for over 75 years. It is little wonder we cannot see it–it is what has shaped who we are as a whole.
tODD’s not going to like this.
I don’t like this.
See, I knew it!
Okay, I’ll be slightly more serious now.
So, not surprisingly, the Chronicle article actually says nothing about “newsrooms” or the media. You can read that into it if you want, but it’s not there.
If I’ve made claims of any sort about hiring practices in academia, you’ll have to remind me of them. I don’t doubt that there are “disproportionate” numbers of liberals in academia (in scare quotes there, because proportionality can be a subjective thing, though the article and those here would seem to argue that any sample should perfectly mirror some larger whole).
Nor do I think I’ve argued that the relative levels of “liberals” and “conservatives” (Democrats and Republicans?) in the media mirror those found on average in America. I do remember rebutting some ridiculous article that attempted to discern the number of Democrats at NBC by poorly querying a donations database, but that’s a different story.
No, in general, I have spent my time questioning whether the media’s reporting is, on average, consistently liberally biased — regardless of what those who produce it may personally think. My argument remains that the media outlets are only as liberally biased as the corporations that own them and the corporations that buy advertising from them.
But I’d like to comment on Veith’s note that “Those who hold the postmodernist assumption that everything is political cannot exempt themselves from their own worldview!” Fair enough. But then, nor can those who hold a contrary worldview do the same, and I argue that Veith and DonS are doing just that.
It has been the, if you will, “liberal” view that the Supreme Court’s demographic makeup needs to mirror that of society at large. That a court of nine white men is inherently biased, both in its construction and, necessarily, in the opinions that it produces. That, as Veith alludes to, the personal is political.
Conversely, it has been the “conservative” argument that this is not so, that nine white men are perfectly capable of being fair-minded, of producing unbiased opinions that are fair to non-whites and women. That, I guess you’d say, the personal is not political.
And yet, here we see two conservatives — who would almost certainly argue with the latter argument that you don’t have to have a Hispanic person on the Supreme Court in order to have opinions that are fair to Hispanics — apparently arguing that a “disproportionate” number of “liberals” in the media necessarily will produce liberally biased articles.
You can’t have it both ways, either.
IF you want to know what the Republican view of science and history looks like in Texas , go to http://www.tfninsider.org/
Or maybe it means that disparate-outcome determination of discrimination is itself misled?