David Horowitz and his gaggle of right-wing emenies of academic freedom (like the so-called “Bruin Alumni Association” at UCLA) have been a on rampage in recent months. Horowitz has humped his “Academic Bill of Rights”as the solution to a phantom problem: liberal professors who ideologically abuse conservative students and give them lower or even failing grades because of their political views.
Hororwitz has never provided any systematic evidence to support his claims about classroom bias (nor does he supply evidence that liberal professors are murders, a claim made in his recent book-length rant about liberal/left professors).
Well, as it turns out there is empirical research on the issue in question and the evidence suggests that there is no relationship between students political views and their grades, with one interesting exception: in some disciplines favored by conservative students (e.g., business and economics), students with liberal politics are the ones receiving lower grades. Hmmm…
Inside Higher Ed reports: “Markus Kemmelmeier, a sociologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has been watching the Academic Bill of Rights debate with growing frustration, because he thinks there is proof about the question about classroom bias that has been ignored. “I just don’t see evidence” of bias, says Kemmelmeier, one of three authors of an in-depth study on the topic that was published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.”
Kemmelmeier’s research shows conservative and liberal students do equally well in courses with politically charged content (e.g., sociology, women’s studies, African American studies, education, cultural anthropology) and the results casts doubt on conservative activists’ claims that liberal faculty members routinely discriminate against their conservative students.
These results are from a four-year longitudinal study that began in the late 1990s, Kemmelmeier surveyed 3,890 students at a major public university in the Midwest. Asked to describe their political orientation, 2.7 percent identified themselves as far left, 34.6 percent as liberal, 42 percent as middle of the road, 20 percent as conservative, and 1.2 percent as far right.
Mr. Kemmelmeier then compared the transcripts of a variety of students taking the same courses, specifically courses taught in the economics department and the business school (which Mr. Kemmelmeier considered “hierarchy-enhancing,” or conservative) and those taught in American culture, African-American studies, cultural anthropology, education, nursing, sociology, and women’s studies (which he considered “hierarchy-attenuating,” or liberal).
He found that in the latter courses, students’ political orientations had no effect on their grades — which, the study says, suggests that disciplines such as sociology and anthropology “might be more accepting of a broad range of student perspectives,” while economics and business classes “appear to be more sensitive to whether student perspectives are compatible with those of the academic discipline.”
In economics and business classes, the study found, conservative students earned better grades. It also found that conservative students were likely to gaduate with higher GPA’s in those courses than liberal students who entered college with similar SAT scores.
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This study doesn’t prove anything. The fact that you think it might is scary. Did you ever consider that the business and economics classes might be more demanding than sociology and anthropology?
But more importantly, this study measures grades, not bias. There is nothing in the study that shows bias of anything.
A sociology professor claims the bias is in the business and economics courses. Hilarious. Keep up the denial guys, it’s only making people that had to deal with liberal bias very, very angry.