I find that I’m often struggling to find a way to best answer a question that comes up so often now that I’m a college student: Why are colleges so liberal?
Curious myself, I picked up a book titled One Party Classroom by David Horowitz. Horowitz argues that professors in the most prestigious and high-ranked universities are trying to “indoctrinate” their students into their personal political ideologies and agendas by lecturing from clearly biased or unbalanced viewpoints. In other words, professors are preaching rather than teaching. The result is a political classroom environment with a decidedly liberal inclination that, according to Horowitz, destroys any hope of obtaining a quality college education. While I didn’t agree with all of Horowitz’s claims about classes within certain departments at various universities, and occasionally felt that his research couldn’t have possibly captured the whole picture (seeing as he didn’t mention interviews with students and most professors and deans), he did have a point that professors’ viewpoints inevitably shine through their instruction.
Slightly liberal myself, I confess that I don’t really mind my liberal professors and wrote Horowitz off as accusatory and over-exaggerating. But when I stumbled across an interview with Stephen H. Norwood, a professor of history at University of Oklahoma and author of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, on the New York Times “Idea of the Day” blog yesterday, I began to reconsider.
In the early 1930s, there was a quota on the number of Jews that universities would admit. “They just didn’t care very deeply about Jews and anti-Semitism because they were themselves involved in maintaining quota barriers against Jewish students. There were very, very few Jews on the faculties of American universities throughout the entire inter-war period. And there are whole fields that were basically off-limits to Jews,” Norwood said.
According to Norwood, this book reveals “very shameful record of complicity and indifference to atrocities committed against the Jews from 1933 onward — and actually a lot of collaboration, in terms of participating in well-organized student exchange programs, participating in well-orchestrated Nazi festivals in Germany, sending delegates to those and ignoring protests” back home. It’s frightening to think that universities forced such hateful and radical political agendas onto students, especially Jewish students immediately preceding the Holocaust. To act so directly and obviously against this already severely limited group, aside from being blatantly unfair, also reflects much of Horowitz’s discussion on biased and unbalanced viewpoints in the classroom. From Norwood’s interview, it is clear that professors’ politics manifested themselves in student experiences, as many actually went to Germany to participate in pro-Nazi rallies.
Although the 1930s are well behind us, anti-Jewish sentiments, unfortunately, aren’t. In his book, Horowitz discussed the problems at Columbia University, where a couple of professors quite bluntly preach their anti-Israel sentiments. His account of the problems at Columbia is similar to the well-known film “Columbia Unbecoming,” which shows students expressing their fear to approach these professors, let alone sit in their classrooms, sharing stories of professors encouraging their classes to attend pro-Palestinian rallies. Sadly, this trend isn’t necessarily unique to Columbia. Even more sadly, this doesn’t sound too different than the pro-Nazi professors 1933. Many professors today profess their empathy for the Palestinian viewpoint at the expense of a balanced discussion of the entire conflict. (Please note that I’m not endorsing one view over another here; I would just like to point out that this classroom style is a legitimate threat to a fair and comprehensive educational experience.)
So what can we do? There’s no longer a quota. Many colleges and universities in America have large Jewish populations. Today, we have the opportunity to make our voices heard and to make an impact. Debate in the classroom, when appropriate, is a good way to ensure that everyone hears alternative points of view. It’s never wrong to properly analyze and critique events, ideas, and ideologies. Our voices are essential to keeping our academic freedom.
