“Privilege: A group of unearned cultural, legal, social, and institutional rights extended to a group based on their social group membership. Individuals with privilege are considered to be the normative group, leaving those without access to this privilege invisible, unnatural, deviant, or just plain wrong. Most of the time, these privileges are automatic and most individuals in the privileged group are unaware of them.… (J. Beal 2009)”
SJWs tell us that whites, men, straight people, cis people, and Christians have privilege. However, on campus (and in some other areas of life), this is simply not true. It’s leftists who have the power on campus.
When I started researching for this chapter, I expected to find evidence of at least some liberal bias on campus, but I was open to the possibility that conservatives who complain about liberal bias may be exaggerating. After all, it’s human nature to make a mountain out of a molehill.
However, what I have found is truly astonishing. There is indeed a mountain, and it’s Mt. Everest.
Portland State University political science professor Bruce Gilley wrote an essay, “The Case for Colonialism”. After a petition by critics, an apology by the author, and “serious and credible threats of personal violence”, the author asked for the essay to be withdrawn. It is leftists on campus who have the power to coerce self-censorship on campus. They are the ones with privilege.
From “A Crisis in Confidence”, a 2012 report prepared by the California Association of Scholars, we learn the following:
“American university faculties have, at least since the mid-twentieth century, leaned to the political left, and if recent surveys of faculty only found that this continues to be the case, there would be no need for concern. However, a great deal of recent empirical work has shown that what is now happening goes well beyond that traditional pattern in a number of ways….
- The extent of the tilt to the left has been growing and has now reached a magnitude not remotely matched in the past. In some areas it is so extreme that it amounts to virtual exclusion of any but left-of-center faculty members.
- The kind of leftism has also become considerably more extreme.
- The more that politics is relevant to a field of study (the most obvious cases being those of political science and sociology) the greater the preponderance of left-of-center faculty members and the more complete the exclusion of any but left-of-center faculty members…. [E]xactly where programmatic concerns would most suggest a need for a wider range of voices, that range is most likely to be absent. This pattern is strongly suggestive of a conscious intent in the hiring process.
- Younger faculty members are more solidly left-oriented than older faculty members, which means that the extent of the tilt continues to grow as retirements replaced by new appointments increase the imbalance.
- College faculty members have become far more likely to admit that activism is a goal of their teaching….
“A study done in 1999 by the political scientist Stanley Rothman found a decisive shift from historical patterns. According to Rothman and his co-authors Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte: ‘The results indicate that a sharp shift to the left has taken place among college faculty in recent years…’.
“In 1969, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s survey had found that 45 percent of faculty had political views that were left or liberal, while 27 percent were middle of the road, and 28 percent either moderately or strongly conservative. By contrast, Rothman now [in 1999] found margins that were much more extreme. Whether the question was posed in terms of liberals versus conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans, the margins favored the former by nearly 5:1 in each case, and in some departments the results were overwhelming. For example, in English departments the margin was 88:3, and in Politics 81:2.”
So, if there are 81 liberal professors for every 2 conservative ones in politics departments, do you suppose this could tilt the teaching some?
Neil Gross and Solon Simmons (2007) studied “a large sample of faculty (from 927 different institutions)”. They measured political leanings two ways: self-identification and using a more objective measurement, the “Pew scale”. The Pew scale showed “the faculty in their sample were 9 percent conservative (though not very), 10 percent slightly left, and 80 percent solidly left, with half of those extreme left.”
So, imagine if you have ten people in a room. Four of them are radical leftists, four more are solidly on the left, one is slightly left, and then there’s one moderate conservative. Guess how the conversation will go. That’s the basic situation we have on college campuses.
And this comes from researchers who apparently did not want to show this result, and attempted to hide their own best data.
In addition to the strong circumstantial evidence of a bias in hiring, here is some even better evidence:
“Focusing initially on his own discipline of sociology, [researcher George] Yancey asked faculty which of a list of factors would make them more, and less, likely to vote for an applicant for a faculty position. Twenty-seven percent said that they would weigh an applicant more favorably if he/she were a member of the Democratic party, and 29 percent said that they would weigh an applicant less favorably if he/she were a member of the Republican party…. These figures are, to be sure, less than 50 percent; but their significance is much greater than might seem to be the case, for two reasons. First, they are self-reported. For every person who will admit to even a partly-disguised bias that they know to be unprofessional, there will be many more who have the same bias but are too self-protective to admit it. And second, a departmental vote can easily be tipped to one candidate against another by just a few votes, sometimes even by just one strong voice. A voting block of the size found by Yancey would be decisive most of the time.
“Having begun with his own discipline, Yancey broadened his study to include a number of other disciplines, where he found much the same results.”
Having such a limited range of viewpoints amongst college professors inevitably results in a poorer education. Thinking capacities are developed through evaluating competing ideas, not from being spoon-fed doctrine. And indeed, “A considerable body of evidence now shows that recent college graduates are poorly educated, and that they have not been prepared for citizenship by their college education. One study after another has found that they write badly, can’t reason, can’t read any reasonably complex material, have alarming gaps in their knowledge of the history and institutions of the society in which they live, and are in general poorly prepared for the post-college workplace.”
For example, a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa “tested 2,300 students at 24 different institutions before and after their first two years in college, and came to the sad conclusion that ‘We observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study.’”
Ironically, the leftist political indoctrination happening in our colleges is apparently having an especially detrimental effect on minorities. “Political radicals claim to support progress for minorities, but everything they do works against that goal. They take impressionable students and persuade them to adopt their own sense of alienation from society, and that has two immediate results. Radicals themselves benefit by having more troops and so more influence on campus, but minorities are robbed of the confidence in their society that they need if they are to be motivated to master its ways and succeed. Persuading minority students to focus above all on the fact that they have been historically wronged was not hard to do, but in doing so, alienated radicals were preying on those students, not helping them. They were making the education that minorities so badly need inaccessible to them. In this respect, the radical agenda is not idealistic but selfish; nothing could be more destructive for minorities. Arum and Roksa give us further evidence of the damage that is being done here. We know that African-American students enter higher education with lower Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) scores than their white counterparts. But Arum and Roksa found that ‘During their first two years of college, white students gained 41 CLA points, while African-American students gained only 7 points…. As a consequence, the gap between African-American and white students increased over time.’ Initial inequalities ought to have moderated but instead have been exacerbated.”
This horrifying report is essential reading.
So, it appears that on campus, it’s leftist privilege that dominates. It’s leftists who are setting the agenda, who are marginalizing the voices of the ideological minority (i.e., non-leftists).
And when will we begin to see campus leftists “check their leftist privilege”? When are they going to listen first to dissenting views, and then refrain from expressing anything that contradicts those views, which is what SJWs often recommend members of a privileged group should do?
Would it be a good idea to start “calling out” leftist for “leftsplaining” when they are telling non-leftists how they should think and feel?
(See “mansplaining”, “whitesplaining”. “Mansplaining” is a term that SJW’s sometimes use, when a man is explaining something about women to women. “Whitesplaining” is the same concept except it is a white person explaining something about blacks to a black person. These “splaining” terms are meant to imply that the person doing the “splaining” doesn’t know what he or she is talking about because of his or her identity.)
And it’s non-conforming thinkers on campus who are bullied today.
I think it would be reasonable to ask leftists to come up with a more equitable power-sharing arrangement on campuses before they start giving the world advice on how to handle “privilege”.
In addition, college classrooms are not the only place in society that is dominated by leftists. The social sciences are dominated by leftists, with 82% of social scientists saying they would discriminate against a conservative in hiring. This bias effects our social science research, and may explain why the worthless implicit bias test (IAT) has been in use for so long.
The major media have a strong liberal bias, as is shown by much research. For example, an Indiana University poll has found four times as many journalists identifying as “liberal” vs. “conservative”.
CrowdPac has researched the political contributions of people in the media, Hollywood, and academia. The same patterns emerge. All three are extremely leftist. According to a conservative screenwriter, Andrew Klavan, in Hollywood, “(i)f you’re a conservative, especially a religious person, people have to meet in secret. They talk in whispers. It’s a very disturbing kind of culture.”
So it’s actually leftists who have the power, not only in college classrooms, but throughout the major institutions that influence our culture.
And this is why they’ve been able to perpetrate yet another major fraud on our society: the Black Lives Matter fraud. You won’t believe how easy this is to debunk! Just click the link down on the right to learn more….