On our last Campus Report radio broadcast, guests fresh from the college scene offered examples of how acute the political bias is on American college campuses today. The Campus Report, a monthly broadcast on www.rightalk.com, is produced by Accuracy in Academia.
The Campus Report’s Squeaky Chalk columnist, Deborah Lambert, reported on a poll in which most students say that their professors tilt classroom lectures to the left. And, the poll by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni shows, this tilt does not only occur in political science classes.
I asked the identifiably conservative Dr. Thomas Woods how many political soulmates he can count on at Suffolk Community College in New York State. Dr. Woods came up with a count of one.
“Taking a Big Tent approach, we might get the number up to four,” said Dr. Woods. “But that’s counting faculty and administrators and our campus employs hundreds.”
Suffolk Community College is affiliated with the State University of New York. Dr. Woods is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which I recently reviewed in Human Events.
Diane Macedo [pictured], a recent graduate of Boston College, certainly knows what it is like to face the current wisdom on campus. When she asked her Broadcasting professor whether the lecturer’s nemesis, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, actually uncovered any Communist spies working in the U. S. government, Dr. Michael Kieth was forced to admit that the Wisconsin Senator had unearthed a few.
Diane mentioned the magic word—Venona, the U. S. government’s decoding of cables sent from the former Soviet Union to Communist agents in the United States. The exploits of many of these agents were examined by Sen. McCarthy.
Diane’s biggest victory was yet to come. She got an A- on her class paper on broadcast bias. “He shuddered when he saw the title,” Diane remembers of her professor. “But he could not refute anything in it.”
Next to a passage in the paper, Dr. Keith wrote, “This doesn’t sound right.” The passage showed that most media corporations give most of their charitable donations, by an overwhelming margin, to left-wing charities.
Diane thought highly of that professor personally. She was equally impressed by his media credentials but found the insertion of his political views into classroom lectures annoying, to say the least.
When I told Dr. Woods that the conservative professors who I know draw a sharp wall of separation between their political views and their classroom lectures, he said he did the same. “I actually have students asking for an opinion that I don’t want to give,” Dr. Woods says.
Indeed, Dr. Woods wrote his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History after wading through the mostly P. C. texts that teachers have to choose among. Dr. Woods actually emerged from the Ivy Leagues, no bastions of conservatism they, leaning to the political right.
Ironically, a professor at Harvard told Dr. Woods that conservative scholars are more meticulous in their research than their liberal counterparts.
