Business Case for Myths

The 'Conservatives' argue that college campuses brainwash kids in an ocean of 'liberal' propaganda- and the 'liberal' researchers conduct one study after another to prove that campus are 'bi-political.'

The unfortunate casualty of this bifurcation is the real education of our youngsters. If we get away from these 'idiocy-inducing' labels and start discussing real values, then we can hope to make progress. Experiments can be designed to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of various programs.

A 'liberal' education is supposed to 'free' students from fear and train them to think. Labeling, in any form, makes it easier to skip the hard work of thinking and of using the brain cells.

Five myths about liberal academia

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022503169_pf.html

Do red-blooded, hard-working Americans pay thousands of dollars each year to send their children to college, only to have those kids turned into pot-smoking Obamacare-lovers by a pack of communist hippies? This stereotype -- professors as brainwashing left-wing ideologues -- has dogged academia at least since the Vietnam War era. But our nation's vilified professoriate isn't composed of just Marxists and Whole Foods shoppers. Let's upend five popular misconceptions about the people educating the next generation.

1. Today's professors are more moderate than radical professors from the 1960s.

A recent, widely reported study on the political views of U.S. college professors provides evidence that younger professors are more likely than their older colleagues to define themselves as moderates. However, more relevant than how individuals identify themselves is where they fall on specific political and social questions.

For our new book, "The Still Divided Academy," we surveyed more than 4,000 professors, students and administrators from four-year colleges throughout the United States. We compared the views of professors born after 1955, those born between 1946 and 1955, and those born before 1945. The youngest group was most liberal on key social issues, 7 percentage points more likely than the middle group and 14 percentage points more likely than the oldest group to agree with the statement "homosexuality is as acceptable a lifestyle as heterosexuality." And the youngest group was 8 percentage points more likely than the oldest group to agree that "it is all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married." If this trend continues as older professors retire, college faculties won't become more moderate, but will drift toward the left.