Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T14:20:17.278Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

ANTI-CONSERVATIVE BIAS IN EDUCATION IS REAL — BUT NOT UNJUST

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2014

Michael Cholbi*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bloom, Allan, Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; D’Souza, Dinesh, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Berube, Michael, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006)Google Scholar; and Horowtiz, David and Laskin, Jacob, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top College Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Democracy (New York: Crown Forum/Random House, 2009).Google Scholar

2 In the studies I discuss in this essay, subjects were identified as liberal and conservative through a combination of methods, including self-identification, surveys of their attitudes toward political liberals and conservatives, and surveys of their stances of particular political questions, such as the widely used Wilson-Patterson scale of conservatism. See Wilson, Glenn D. and Patterson, J. R., “A new measure of conservatism,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 7 (1968): 264–69.Google Scholar

3 American Conservative Union, Statement of Principles (December 1964). http://conservative.org/about-acu/principles/.

4 Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert, “Inside the GOP” (Democracy Corps Research Report, October 3, 2013). http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf.

5 Gross, Neil, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2535.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 7.

7 Lydia Saad, “Conservatives Remain Largest Ideological Group in U.S.” Gallup Politics, January 12, 2012 (http://www.gallup.com/poll/152021/conservatives-remain-largest-ideological-group.aspx).

8 Gross, Why are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? 336.

9 J. H. Pryor, K. Eagan, L. P. Blake, S. Hurtado, J. Berdan, and M. H. Case, “The American Freshman: National Norms 2012,” Cooperative Institutional Research Program, Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles.

10 Mariani, Mack D. and Hewitt, Gordon J., “Indoctrination U.? Faculty Ideology and Changes in Student Political Orientation,” PS: Political Science and Politics 41, no. 4 (2008): 773–83Google Scholar; Stoker, Laura, and Kent Jennings, M., “Of Time and the Development of Partisan Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 3 (2008): 619–35; and Pryor et al., “The American Freshman.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Saloner, Brendan, “Does College Make You Liberal?Inequalities, March 12, 2012 (http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/does-college-make-you-liberal/).Google Scholar

12 Cook, Charlie, “The Growing Educational Attainment Gap,” Cook Political Report, January 8, 2009. (http://cookpolitical.com/story/2125).Google Scholar

13 Woessner, Matthew, “Rethinking the Plight of Conservatives in Higher Education,” Academe (American Association of University Professors), January–February 2012 (http://www.aaup.org/article/rethinking-plight-conservatives-higher-education).Google Scholar

14 Carney, Dana R., Jost, John T., Gosling, Samuel D., and Potter, Jeff, “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind,” Political Psychology 29, no. 6 (2008): 817.Google Scholar

15 Altemeyer, R. A., “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality’,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 30 (1998): 4791 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tetlock, P. E., Visser, P. S., Singh, R., Polifroni, M., Scott, A., Elson, S. B., et al., “People as Intuitive Prosecutors: The Impact of Social-Control Goals on Attributions of Responsibility,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43 (2007): 195209.Google Scholar

16 Jost, John T., Glaser, Jack, Kruglanski, Arie W., and Sulloway, Frank F., “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 3 (2003): 369.Google Scholar

17 Helzer, Erik G., and Pizarro, David A., “Dirty Liberals!: Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes,” Psychological Science 20 (2011): 16.Google Scholar

18 Inbar, Yoel, Pizarro, David A., and Bloom, Paul, “Conservatives Are More Easily Disgusted Than Liberals,” Cognition & Emotion 23, no. 4 (2009): 714–25.Google Scholar

19 Schaller, Mark and Duncan, Lesley A., “The Behavioral Immune System: Its Evolution and Social Psychological Implications,” in Forgas, J. P., Haselton, M. G., and von Hippel, W., eds., Evolution and the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Social Cognition (New York: Psychology Press, 2007), 293307.Google Scholar

20 Smith, Kevin B., Oxley, Douglas, Hibbing, Matthew V., Alford, John R., and Hibbing, John R., “Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations,” PLOS One 6, e2552 (2011). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025552.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

21 Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie, “To Provide or Protect: Motivational Bases of Political Liberalism and Conservatism,” Psychological Inquiry 20, nos. 2–3 (2009): 120–28Google Scholar; and Rock, Mindi S. and Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie, “Where Do We Draw Our Lines? Politics, Rigidity, and the Role of Self-Regulation,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (2010): 2633.Google Scholar

22 Lavine, H., Burgess, D., Snyder, M., Transue, J., Sullivan, J., Haney, B., et al., “Threat, Authoritarianism, and Voting: An Investigation of Personality and Persuasion,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 337–47.Google Scholar

23 Kanai, Ryota, Feilden, Tom, Firth, Colin, and Rees, Geraint, “Political Orientations are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults,” Current Biology 21 (2011): 677–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

24 Mondak, Jeffery J., Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

25 Carney et al., “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives,” 817.

26 Jost et al., “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.”

27 Martinez, Margaret A., An Investigation into Successful Learning Measuring the Impact of Learning Orientation, a Primary Learner-Difference Variable, on Learning. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 1999.Google Scholar

28 Cholbi, Michael, “Intentional Learning as a Model for Philosophical Pedagogy,” Teaching Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2007): 3558.Google Scholar

29 Shook, Natalie J. and Fazio, Russell H., “Political Ideology, Exploration of Novel Stimuli, and Attitude Formation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, no. 4 (2009): 997.Google Scholar

30 Eidelman, S., Crandall, C. S., Goodman, J. A., and Blanchar, J. C., “Low-effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38, no. 6 (2012): 809.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

31 Luguri, J. B., Napier, J. L., and Dovidio, J. F., “Reconstruing Intolerance: Abstract Thinking Reduces Conservatives’ Prejudice against Nonnormative Groups,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 756–63.Google Scholar

32 Everett Carl Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 60.Google Scholar

33 See Anderson, Lorin W. and Krathwohl, David R., et al., Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (New York: Longman, 2011).Google Scholar

34 Perry, William G. Jr. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970).Google Scholar

35 Martinez, An Investigation into Successful Learning Measuring the Impact of Learning Orientation; and Cholbi, “Intentional Learning as a Model for Philosophical Pedagogy.”

36 Gross, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?105.

37 Schmidtz, David, “How to Deserve,” Political Theory 30, no. 6 (2002): 774–99.Google Scholar

38 Rawls, John, Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 1971), 7.Google Scholar

39 Bain, Ken, What the Best College Students Do (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012).Google Scholar

40 For a useful introduction to this view, see Arneson, Richard, “Luck Egalitarianism Interpreted and Defended,” Philosophical Topics 32, nos.1–2 (2004): 120.Google Scholar

41 Alford, John, Funk, Carolyn, and Hibbing, John R., “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?American Political Science Review 99 (2005): 153–67Google Scholar; and Hatemi, Peter K., Funk, Carolyn L., Medland, Sarah E., Maes, Hermine M., Silberg, Judy L., Martin, Nicholas G., and Eaves, Lindon J., “Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Attitudes over a Life Time,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 3 (2009): 1141–56.Google Scholar

42 Block, J., and Block, J. H., “Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later,” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 5 (2006): 734–49.Google Scholar

43 Plato, Republic, C. D. C. Reeve, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), Stephanus page 375a.

44 Ibid., Stephanus 375c.

45 Ibid., Stephanus 375e.

46 Ibid., Stephanus 376b.

47 Stanovich, Keith E., Rationality and the Reflective Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 36 Google Scholar; and Esch, Emily, “A Cognitive Approach to Teaching Philosophy,” Teaching Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2013): 108112.Google Scholar