Provision tells schools to grade students on subjects, not ideology

[Eugene]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/08/08/provision_tells_schools_to_grade_students_on_subjects_not_ideology/

Provision tells schools to grade students on subjects, not ideology

Measure aims to shield campus conservatives

By Kaitlin Bell, Globe Correspondent | August 8, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Congress is taking the first steps toward pressuring
colleges to maintain ideological balance in the classroom, a move
that supporters insist is needed to protect conservative students
from being graded down by liberal professors.

A resolution attached to the reauthorization of the Higher Education
Act, which has passed the House Education and the Workforce Committee
and is expected to be taken up by the full House in September, tells
colleges to grade students on the basis of their mastery of subject
matter rather than on their political views.

The provision makes no mention of specific political leanings, but
represents a victory for conservative student groups who have been
arguing for years that American universities are bastions of
liberalism seeking to impose their liberal orthodoxy on dissenters.

The measure is not binding, but some higher education analysts caution
that it is not to be taken lightly. Colleges and universities, they
say, should consider this a warning shot from a Republican-controlled
Congress fed up with the liberal academy.

more...

[democrat in Tallahassee]

1. two words:

Fuck congress

[Demeter]

8. Two More Words

What Crap!

[annabanana]

2. a "warning shot"?

Colleges and universities, they say, should consider this a warning shot from a Republican-controlled Congress fed up with the liberal academy.


I suggest that the "Republican-controlled Congress" consider the state of the world, the state of the economy, the state or the war and the state of their states "warning shots" from an America fed up with the f*cked up Congress!

They think they are giants.

[TankLV]

29. So when a "democratic controlled" congress makes rules that only favor the

Democratic Party and liberals, they will have no problem with that, right?

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Vague. Ambiguous. Overbroad. Unconstitutional

What's next? Fire professors who disagree with The Reich?

[bluestateguy]

4. I can just see it now

Some whiny conservative student gets a D on his term paper and then bitches that the mean liberal professor graded him down because his paper said that Saddam was involved in 9/11, the the WMD's have been found in Iraq and that the US has only lost 100 troops in the war.

[ck4829]

15. Ha! It's already happened!

Some guy wrote a 'patriotic' paper, only problem was is that it was low quality, and then he complained to David Horowitz, I bet you know what happens next.

"Foothill College student Ahmad al-Qloushi -- who claims that he received a failing grade on a term paper about the U.S. Constitution because it was "pro-American" and whose allegations have been publicized by right-wing pundit David Horowitz -- appeared as a guest on the February 17 edition of FOX News' Hannity & Colmes. But no one on the show mentioned that al-Qloushi's professor disputes his version of events, that al-Qloushi's claims were originally publicized by the Foothill College Republicans (of which al-Qloushi is president), or that al-Qloushi has been touted by Horowitz to promote Horowitz's right-wing university campus initiatives."

http://mediamatters.org/items/200502220005

[BootinUp]

22. I'm glad World News Tonight

is covering such important stuff and doing a fine job too. :eyes:

[Athame]

18. The complaints don't start with a D

More like an A-. I kid you not. We have had several such complaints at my university in the past year, usually from students with parents who are "personal friends of Arnold" and claiming that their political science professors were biased against conservative students. I think it is a stealth campaign. The largest number are appealing from A- to A.

[fasttense]

5. What they haven't asked professors and teachers to sign loyalty oaths

to brush yet??? What are they waiting for? We can't have differing opinions in the class room.

[Solly Mack]

6. Oh fuck them

[rodeodance]

7. this is a dangerous move by Congress.

[Solly Mack]

I agree

and it pisses me off.

[BlueEyedSon]

9. Universities should get together and retroactively FAIL the Congress

[sniffa]

10. we have to save the endangered white

maLe conservative, somehow.

just imagine how much more endangered their species wouLd be, if they weren't such cowards and signed up to fight the war they support.

[pecwae]

11. "Fed up with liberal academy"

but didn't most of the Repub controlled Congress graduate from a heinous "liberal" school? Didn't seem to affect their political leanings any unless they maintain that it made them more conservative. Why can't Congress work on real issues; poverty, health care, etc.?

[sniffa]

13. weLcome to DU

:hi:

congress needs red-meat, distractions so they don't have to work.

[bluestateguy]

14. Nobody is forcing them to attend those "liberal" schools

They are free to consider Bob Jones University, or George Mason University or Texas A&M.

[Southpaw Bookworm]

21. hey now

Keep them out of GMU -- VA needs all the blues it can get. Besides, Mason isn't all that conservative, considering that half it's students are minorities and/or immigrants. I can't see Bob Jones having a Pakistani or Kurdish or West African Student Association.

[Chovexani]

32. Just because people are immigrants, doesn't mean they're liberals

In fact I find the opposite is true. Well, it was the case at my school at least.

Some of the staunchest conservative types in my poli sci classes were West Indian and Russian immigrants. The former tended to be fundies in the Falwell/Robertson mold, and the latter tended to be your garden variety freeper type.

Hell, I live in a neighborhood that is mostly Caribbean immigrants and you'd think this was the Bible Belt instead of Brooklyn with all the obnoxious fundie bumper stickers you see around here. It depends on the island they come from, but on the whole the cultures tend to be extremely conservative (at least socially).

[Southpaw Bookworm]

37. Good point

The phenomenon I was referring to was the fact that the Republicans are frequently demonizing the cultural groups these students belong to: Muslims, Hispanics, undocumented immigrants, and brown people in general. But I do know a lot of GMU students, and even among the immigrants, they tend to be much more progressive than their parents' generation, even though they wear hijab or live with their extended families.

[A Simple Game]

12. Apparently all of these liberal professors

couldn't convert this batch of congress persons and senators when they attended all of these liberal schools.

I am assuming that most of them have more than a Jethro education.

[Massacure]

16. I don't see why everyone is bitching.

Grading on quality and relevance rather than politics is already done. If that is in the bill, then so be it.

Hopefully Congress won't bury anything else in there. Enforcement will be very interesting.

[tomg]

24. There is a hell of a lot to be concerned about.

I have been a college teacher for eighteen years ( including ta, adjunct and replacements - thirty one) I don't know of any college teachers who grade on one's politics, although I am sure it happens, but when it does it is just bad teaching.

More to the point, from my experience, it seems that most college teachers are, in fact,liberal.Although most academics tend to be liberal there is a fair range as to discipline. Most of the "studies" emphasize academics in the liberal arts (such as English, my field, which is very liberal) as opposed to, say, business professors, where there is far more balance ( as there is in engineering, some sciences, agriculture). Most of the studies also emphasize top tier universities (the Harvards and Yales and Stanfords) rather than where most of us teach ( community colleges, comprehensive mid-range universities, small liberal arts, regional religious-affiliated). So the studies are pretty flawed, though the findings - most academics are liberal - are in some sense valid. This, then allows Horowitz et. al(and he is only the most vocal - check Candace de Russey of SUNY and Anne Neal president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni) to propose a vast "conspiracy," which can only be rectified by a kind of "affirmative action" for conservatives. With Ward Churchill as the main reason these intimidated conservatives need help.

It seems to me that the reason there are more "liberals" than "conservatives" in the humanities is obvious. Getting a Ph.D is time-consuming, can be fairly expensive, and the job market is horrible ( the joke is, shake a tree and an unemployed English Ph.D. falls out, only to land on an unemployed philosophy Ph.D.). So it isn't the best ecomonic investment for a bright young man or woman who wants to make quite a bit of money. The quality of life is great, and I would not change it for anything, but the money at an average comprehensive is fair, but not what Horowitz and others would have one believe ( ps. - I earn 60,000 as an associate prof). If one does want to teach and make more money, then they are probably in one of the non-liberal arts fields (business, engineering) where market conditions require higher salaries ( and where there is more balance, although still liberal leaning.) Just by way of comparison, a newly-minted assistant prof in English starts at about 36,000 - a new assistant prof in business is at 45,000 ( at least where I teach- and that was the last time I checked).

Lest anyone think I am suggesting "we" are altruistic and "they" are venal, I am not. I am just coming off a 1/2 year sabbatical.As I said, the quality of life is great and for me was worth the risk, the lower salary, and the hustle to get tenure. Besides, I really love teaching.

The real problem is the intimidation. There is absolutely no way that they can enforce a law demanding "fair and balanced" teaching and grading. They can - through alumni associations and trustees and donors - do a lot of intimidating of academics and, more to the point, admissions offices, administrations, hiring committees, and tenure decisions. It can have a major impact on funding for the NEH and the NEA. It isn't about firing or silencing the Zinn's and the Chomskys ( and it really isn't about the Ward Churchills). It certainly isn't about "intimidating" conservatives. It is simply about putting a chill on the universities and getting those professors to think twice before they ask their students to question things. Sorry for the long post. I've negotiated faculty contracts at my institution, and I'm in this stuff up to my ears.

[Massacure]

26. Thanks for the well thought out post.

I agree with you that a law like this has no way to be enforced. But I really do think that the republicans are just pandering for votes rather than trying to intimidate professors. I guess time will tell, and hopefully it is for the better. :)

[pecwae]

33. Intimidation will

be their form of enforcement. My husband works in the career development office of the business school of a large southern university and can see this first hand at work already.

[HereSince1628]

17. And please good students, report any suspicious teachings to

you department's Office of Student Relations and Educational Assurance.

[Vickers]

19. Didn't all those Republicans graduate from liberal schools?

So, they must not be a very big threat as far as indoctrination in to the scary progressive scene, huh?

:eyes:

EDIT: Aaaargh, I just went and read the whole thread, and this point has been made numerous times...sorry! :toast:

[Liberal Veteran]

20. I can see it now....

Biology 101 grading: "You wrote a paper saying the earth was 6000 years old, was factually inaccurate, that Noah had dinosaurs on the Ark, but since you didn't make any spelling errors and your syntax was good, I have to give you an 'A+'."

[DBoon]

23. Conservative students are overprivileged spoiled brats

Yeah daddy's money gets them into college, and when they get crappy grades for doing crappy work, they blame "liberal professors".

No one has a greater sense of unearned entitlement than a conservative college student with rich parents.

[Ian David]

25. How about "Affirmative Action Grading" for conservatives to C.Y.A.

Every once in a while, a teacher can write on a paper, "While I disagree with your politics and conclusions, this essay is well thought-out and factually correct. A."

And then, when the odd conservative student complains of bias, you can wave one or two comparable papers that you gave an A to and say, "The difference is, THOSE papers didn't suck."

That might be a way for a professor to cover their ass.

[Igel]

27. I've said it before, I'll say it again.

I was a tech consultant at a large state university. I didn't see classroom bias often, but I saw an instance or two in which students were marked down--way down--for their views.

One professor was completely over the top: English-language 'war literature' was to expose the fascist, racist, sexist tendencies of the US military, *or* to show how unjustly we presented Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese. Cultural phenomena were ok, too--posters, music, and the like. Manzanita was a great horror, to be treated in isolation; to discuss Bataan would have to focus on how it was really the US's fault, we drove the Japanese to it, and, really, have vastly overblown the 'death march' while dwelling on how the US did the same thing. People wanting to compare US/British literature with Japanese literature weren't allowed to; people wanting to show how women made strides towards equality had to present them not as advancements, but as oppression. Proposed projects required some preliminary work, and were frequently radically altered to be accepted by the prof; and at least one project was derided as "jingoistic and nationalistic, not in sympathy with the struggle for women's rights"--it focused on the WACS.

There was no pre-existing mechanism for dealing with this kind of professor. The dept. chair would have to be the arbitrator. The ombudsman could have been called in, but had no authority to do anything but talk to the people.

It's rare for this kind of thing to happen so blatantly. Notice that this has *nothing* to do with the professor's academic freedom. It has to do with the *student's* academic freedom, something that this professor had apparently agreed was important when she signed her contract, but not really all *that* important when it comes to actually grading somebody.

[Baconfoot]

34. That's absurd. At my university, Professors come up for review after

their first year. At that time, if a Professor is actually doing the sorts of things you are indicating they would not be rehired. They would certainly never receive tenure, and that would force them to leave and/or clean up their act.

Further, even tenured Professors come up for review. While it would be difficult to fire someone, they might be denied a pay raise.

So again, NOBODY is saying this doesn't occur at all. But there ARE mechanisms in place to deal with it. I suspect that such indirect but effective mechanisms existed even at your university. If not, of course they should have.

Besides, these SFAF people lie through their teeth. If you investigate their specific claims they usually turn out false. For example, they claimed that the UCLA bookstore did not contain certain classical books they deem conservative, and that the liberal books outnumbered the conservative books and yadda yadda yadda. Since I go past the UCLA bookstore almost every day, I decided to take an inventory. Sure enough they were LYING. The need for the involvement of the legislature here is PURELY manufactured.

[Igel]

42. The woman was tenure-track, and

she got tenure a couple of years later. No SFAF (?) here.

There's no short answer. Everybody from the provost to the dean to the dept. chair wanted this course, and similar courses, to be perfect. She was a young rising star, considered a really good hire a few years before, popular with majors, and productive: modern American literature, big into post-colonialist and feminist theory. I was the tech geek assigned to that one course to do all the tech crap: digitize, HTML, javascript, scan ... 20 hours/week for 11+ weeks. This was in 1998. The chancellor's unpopular technology initiative, two years in, was floundering, and they wanted to lure tech-naive faculty into using technology in the classroom by producing, at great effort, model courses, each doing something different but completely pedagogically sound with technology.

Half the students were followers of feminist theory and took the course because of this professor; the other half, non-majors who liked war movies and war literature. One half progressive post-modern, the other half rah-rah red state. Woo-hoo! Each student was to do a web-based final presentation in lieu of a final paper/exam. That kept me busy; many needed help, some more than others.

The official offense of the kid I referred to was adding a few minutes of interviews with some ex-WACS he had conducted at the last minute to the very end of his carefully negotiated presentation. The professor listened to the approved presentation with evident boredom, then to maybe a minute of the interviews; then she went red in the face and ended the presentation, telling him to turn off the interviews. Now. She was mad.

The interviews were inadmissible. The prof threw out the presentation, and gave the kid a choice: F for the course, or produce a new topic, get it approved, produce a list of sources and outline, get them approved, produce the presentation. By the end of the week ... and she'd watch it, if she had the time. Then she dismissed the ex-WACS as products of their time, whose opinions mustn't be taken seriously and are of no value at all, maybe even harmful. This made no sense to me, or the student. After all, who could be upset having a student take the initiative to collect real, authentic interviews from ex-WACS 50 years after the fact, talking about what they did, how they felt ...? Instead of a guaranteed A, it produced a solid and immediate F? WTF?

He talked her out of the F and into a D the next day. A D was the best he thought he'd get, he couldn't force her any higher. But he said it didn't take much talking, in and out of her office in a couple of minutes. The dept. chair couldn't have taken his side without knowing what the student agreed to, it was his word against a rising star of a professor doing a favor for the chair; and if the chair sided with the professor, the dean was unlikely to interfere. He had no evidence, and the presentations had to contain basically whatever the professor said they had to.

Two more minutes of talking could have gotten the guy an A, *without* threatening to go to the dept. chair. And maybe sex or a hefty bank deposit, or both. It only took the professor a minute to realize what the interviews meant, and she blew it: she lost her temper. Then she recovered and did necessary damage control in class. She must have decided on the D as her opening bid before the kid ever got to her office to talk about it, also damage control.

Not only shouldn't she have ever gotten tenure, she should have been fired for cause effective that day.

[K-W]

35. All universities have procedures to deal with such situations. EOM

[TrogL]

28. Go for it!

So the next time a "conservative" marks down a liberal paper he can get bitch-slapped.

[meganmonkey]

30. Why don't they just open some "Conservative Arts" universities?

Who's stopping them?

[Zorra]

31. More "Big Government Intrusion" from the republicans. Teaching myth

as fact is their goal.

The US is turning into a real loony bin.

"Conservatives" are fucking crazy. They really are.

They all have LDD - Logic Deficit Disorder.

[Miss Chybil]

36. Maybe some of these "conservative thinkers" get low grades because

they are F'N stupid?

[rinsd]

38. This situation exists for both sides....

..but I don't think federal legislation is the way to handle it.

We've had numerous discussions here on DU about various professors discriminating against students for their views whether those views were from the left or the right.

But on the whole, these self important profs who have closed their minds seem to be the exception and there are procedures in place at universities and colleges for handling this.

[0rganism]

39. So no fairness doctrine for the media, but colleges get to have one

My irony meter seems to be on the fritz today, the pointer's jumping all over the scale.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

40. I have to agree with what some of the posters above have said

What the conservative students complain about is not getting Ds and Fs, but getting Bs.

When they get marked down for sloppy research or no research, they whine about "liberal bias."

I was on the honors committee of a college for the last few years of my former academic career, and part of my job was to read and comment on about 1/4 of the senior honors theses at every stage, from outline to finished product. (The other three committee members read the other 3/4.)

The liberal arts profs were very demanding and didn't hesitate to tell students when they had a poorly focused topic or weren't on schedule or were not constructing their argument logically.

The business professors seemed oblivious to such concerns. A student could call her paper "A Japanese View of the U.S.-Japan Trade Deficit" without citing a single non-American source and using twenty-year-old statistics, and the professor didn't notice.

Another used all conservative sources to argue that the existence of Social Security was what depressed the savings rate in this country. Both the student and professor were startled when I asked them to explain Germany, with its well-developed social welfare system and its high savings rate, and they insisted that the paper was "balanced," because they had used Business Week and the The New Republic in addition to a whole list of conservative magazines and monographs from the American Enterprise Institute and the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute.

Another one wrote an outright racist paper about how Native Americans had been "ruined" by welfare. Not surprisingly, this student had a professor who, in conversations with other faculty members, attributed the global population explosion to all those dark-skinned people in the tropics being oversexed.

At that college, students who wanted to avoid liberals needed only to major in business.

[formercia]

41. I say give the little pricks all A++ 's

and when they get out into the real world and start expousing that the World is flat, they will fall flat on their little fundie butts.

[durutti]

43. I've never, ever, ever witnessed a prof grade on "ideology".

FReepers just can't deal with the fact that many of their ideas can't withstand scholarly scrutiny.

[enki23]

44. translation: big government will not tolerate low grades for republicans

.

[Kerrytravelers]

45. This just shows how truly weak they are. This is very sad.