Study: Students who resist change see teachers as biased

It has become a truism among conservative activists that college professors typically have a liberal bias which causes them to give lower grades to students who express right-wing opinions.

In 2005, for example, when Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was a Minnesota state senator, she and another Republican legislator called for a law to forbid this sort of alleged bias.

As reported at the time by the Associated Press, "Their bill would require public colleges to adopt policies prohibiting political, ideological or religious beliefs from being used in grading. The bill would also demand that personal beliefs be excluded from hiring or firing decisions of faculty."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/06/10/study-students-who-resist-change-see-teachers-as-biased/


I recommend clicking on the link to the original Inside Higher Ed article.

And it was a "conservative" "professor" who was also a horrible raciest. She got fired the next semester.

There are several conservative groups including O'Keefe's group which go after professors.

Take videos of your professors.

"O'Keefe: It's the year 2010 now. We've really got to start using multimedia. Videos and audio and YouTube. I mean, I started out doing a publication, but, I started taking videos of my professors, and that's what got me into being a videographer and a filmmaker.

So, I would suggest just take photos, take video, take audio of your professors' classes. You know, print the transcripts in your paper. And do your own fact finding. Don't just respond to news, but actually create your own headlines. Make demands upon your professors. Make demands upon your university to actually change things. Don't just wait for something to happen and sit back and report on it."

Bills filed in Florida and TN, maybe more, to stifle professors.

"The bill borrows heavily from a template used in similar bills filed nationwide with the help of Horowitz's group, Students for Academic Freedom.

House Bill 837 promises to protect "free inquiry and free speech within the academic community." A portion of the bill says that students should not have their academic freedom "infringed upon by instructors who persistently introduce controversial matter into the classroom that has no relation to the subject of study and serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose." Baxley said that simply means a science professor should stick to that topic and not let any digressions into other matters affect the class...."

And from an article at Front Page in 2005 about TN:

""CHATTANOOGA — A move to create a bill of rights for college students, protecting them from political or religious ''indoctrination'' by faculty members, is part of a larger nationwide push by a conservative group.

Bills filed in the state House and Senate are similar to legislation proposed in at least 20 states and based on ideals backed by Students for Academic Freedom, a Washington, D.C.-based student network founded by conservative activist David Horowitz.

It's intended to ''uphold the presence of multisided academic debate on our campuses,'' said Rep. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, a sponsor of the House bill.

''Most campuses are very liberal, and professors are ashamedly not very open-minded toward our point of view,'' he said."

'indoctrination'..." is a bad fit for the less cognitively vulnerable; some NEED everything reduced to the lowest-common denominator and other students, who are more well-developed cognitively, students who actually know WHY they think what they think - AND - WHY they don't think what they don't agree with, don't need that "protection".

Some people's "indoctrination" is other people's enrichment/stimuli. At our current level of cultural chaos, I'd bet the intellectually and emotionally handicapped achieve disproportionate influence over curricula.