Conservatism in academia

I realize this is a newspaper article for the IDS, and your purpose is to grab attention and create controversy wherever possible and by whatever means – even including spreading some of your own propaganda – but I feel the point of your message loses weight when you engage in the same acts you criticize.

In her column, Chelsea Kane proclaimed, “the university structure enables the promotion of liberal ideology,” as if IU is a factory that functions with the clandestine purpose of converting students to some enigmatic “liberal ideology.”

You speak, taking a page out of Bill O’Reilly’s handbook, of the famed “liberal bias,” which apparently is inherent within the IU political science department, as if it’s some conspiracy to corrupt the minds of the youth and “propagate the faith,” so to speak.

“The political science faculty here at IU, a group of professionals who could benefit the most from a ‘fair and balanced’ distribution of political attitudes and perspectives, is overwhelmingly Democratic,” Kane wrote. You say “overwhelmingly Democratic” because you have statistics from 1983 to 1996, part of which are incomprehensible due to a poor editing job, that concerned 47 percent of the current political science faculty almost 14 years in the past. You are assuming none of the political views of these professors have changed in 14 years and also that the remaining 53 percent of the faculty are mostly “liberal.” You may very well be correct, but you’re proclaiming it as definable fact, while in truth it is only a product of your guessing game.

“In many ways, conservative students have benefited from the ideological challenges posed by their professors. My hope is that their liberal counterparts will one day have this opportunity as well,” Kane continued.

She has a tunnel-vision view of the ideological views of the people in this country. Either they are “conservatives” or they are “liberals.” How do you define these terms? From the sound of your article, you equate them with voting Republican or Democrat.

Perhaps our political science department does indeed have something to answer for. If you are a political science student, yet are still dividing the world into these two ill-defined categories, either the professors have not done their jobs or you were too busy looking under rocks for political biases to comprehend the teachings of men and women who have not only studied, but also lived these political realities for decades longer than you have been alive.

Daniel Stofleth
IU senior