Nicholas Wilbur’s guest commentary, “Producing constructive liberalism” (ODE, April 8), effectively localized the phenomenon of liberalism in academia by discussing his personal experience at the University of Oregon. While I admire Wilbur’s courage and thought in undertaking this loaded topic, I felt the commentary failed to address key issues surrounding this not-so-new trend of university liberalism.
First, I would like to make clear that when it comes to popular images of Bush-bashing, tree-hugging or plainly “liberal” professors, perception does not always equal reality. Still, the idea of the “academic left” reflects some degree of truth; an important question to ask, however, is “so what?”
It is not, as Wilbur so strongly put forth, an “injustice” that public universities are frequently politically charged environments. Political activism on college campuses, regardless of ideological affiliation, can be seen in part as a testament to professors’ success in challenging students to think critically about the world around them. While I admit that instructors (usually poor ones) may heuristically promote a “liberal” atmosphere toward these ends, championing a false sense of classroom “objectivity” is a far greater disservice to the student than taking a few jabs at George W. Bush. An obvious paradox of attempting to take the politics out of education is that it inevitably and unjustly thrusts the government into academia, constituting a major threat to free inquiry and expression.
Education should not necessarily, as Wilbur implies, function to “balance what is commonly known” with “critical liberalism” as much as it should work to prepare students for citizenship in a world that is complicated and ever-changing. Stimulating and promoting students’ critical thinking skills is paramount to achieving this goal.
Perhaps most central to understanding the “dilemma” of university liberalism is a rejection of the assumption that students are passive, impressionable receptors of their professors’
“liberal” opinions. In fact, “liberal bias” in academia has a way of reinforcing and proliferating the views of conservative students just as it has a way of “disseminating” liberal ideology. To substantiate this assertion, one need not look further than the eye-rolling and frustrated devil’s-advocating that represent daily acts of resistance to liberal idealism, anti-Bush diatribe or “political correctness” in the college classroom. My own experience, no less subjective than Wilbur’s, leaves me questioning popular media images of the university freshman becoming politically “enlightened” or “corrupted” by leftist professors.
Finally, one cannot help but find humor in recent conservative attacks on liberal academia ostensibly trying to protect students while in reality belittling their own intellects. In order to reasonably discuss university liberalism, perhaps we must first abandon the romantic quest for true “objectivity” in the classroom.
Joe Feldman lives in Eugene
