[PerkinWarwick]

>Haven't universities been like this for ages?

I can honestly say that when I went to college people were essentially apolitical. I don't remember anything you might view as a campus protest and the biggest fuss on the main mall were students arguing with a rather obnoxious Pentecostal preacher who showed up every year.

(in case you all aren't familiar with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Jed )

[UncleMeat]

I think you'll find if you spend time on universities today, they are essentially apolitical. And I strongly suspect that if you looked for articles written when you attended school, you'd find people complaining in various directions.

The difference is whether you are just going to class or getting your news through articles filtered through social media and link aggregators.

[PerkinWarwick]

>I think you'll find if you spend time on universities today, they are essentially apolitical.

An interesting experiment would be to compare English Department reading lists in the 1970's vs. now.

My bet is that you'd see quite a difference.

It's not that the College Marxist Club had it's meetings in the basement at any particular time, but that politicization and social movements of the day have been normalized into daily life.

I will stick to my guns in saying that there were 0 (zero) demonstrations of a political nature during my stay. For all I know, it was a low point in such activities (which likely gives me a short temper on the modern world). Frank Zappa played there every year though.

...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.

[UncleMeat]

> ...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.

Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?

If this counts as political, then boy howdy were curricula in the humanities political in the 1970s when there was basically zero time spent on the voices of women.

[PerkinWarwick]

>Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?

Not at all, it just stuck out at me while I was browsing through their program. Women represent barely a blip in the world of the 19th C. novel, you might as well teach military history as a series of female leaders. Novels of that era represent a core teaching (or should) in English departments, not an opportunity to boost underserved demographics. Save that for a specialty class.

I don't give a damn about fairness so much as teaching the truth, and the truth includes relative values of things.

[UncleMeat]

It is a graduate class, well past any level where you'd expect reading lists to be a representative slice of anything. I'd generally expect a graduate class on "the 19th century novel" to be roughly built around whatever books the PhD student or professor teaching the class personally loves and knows very deeply.

And military history should involve the voices of women. There is more to the subject than just who marched where and who gave orders when.

[alentist]

Why are you lying?

> An alarming 25.5 percent of survey respondents said it would be appropriate to “create an obstruction, such that a campus speaker endorsing this idea could not address an audience.” This authoritarian view was held by about 19 percent of self-identifying liberals, 3 percent of moderates, and 3 percent of conservatives.

> Among students who self-identify as liberals, some 10 percent said they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about foreign students at least several times a semester, 14 percent said they hear disparaging comments about Muslims, 20 percent said they hear such comments about African Americans, 20 percent said they hear such comments about Christians, 21 percent said they hear such comments about LGBTQ individuals, and 57 percent said they hear such comments about conservatives. Among moderates, 68 percent said that they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about conservatives at least several times a semester.

> Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend. Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/evidence-c...

> In Compromising Scholarship, a 2011 book by sociologist George Yancey, some 30% of sociologists acknowledged that they would be less likely to hire a job applicant if they knew he was a Republican. Yancey further discovered that 15% of political scientists and 24% of philosophy professors would discriminate against Republican job applicants, and at least 30% of professors in all disciplines surveyed would discriminate against members of the NRA.

> Other research suggests that liberal professors sometimes act on these biases. Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter found in 2009's The Politically Correct University that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower-ranked institutions than their publication records would suggest. More recently, a 2016 study of elite law schools in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy found that libertarian and conservative professors publish more than their peers, which suggests that right-leaning law professors must outshine liberals to reach the summits of their profession.

> These findings are especially striking given that other research shows it is more difficult for scholars to publish work that reflects conservative interests and perspectives. A 1985 study in the American Psychologist, for example, assessed the outcomes of research proposals submitted to human subject committees... The study found that the proposals on reverse discrimination were the hardest to get approved, often because their research designs were scrutinized more thoroughly. In some cases, though, the reviewers raised explicitly political concerns.

https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-disappea...