Inside Higher Ed: Tolerant Faculty, Intolerant Students
Inspired by David Horowitz and others, legislators in many states have proposed legislation that would insist on annual reports from public colleges on their efforts to promote “intellectual diversity.” These efforts — which have attracted considerable attention while not moving very far legislatively — have been opposed by most educators. Faculty groups and presidents tend to fear that the measures could pressure colleges into political quotas on hiring or campus speaking engagements, and that these proposals respond to a problem that doesn’t really exist.
The University System of Georgia on Tuesday unveiled an unusual response to this sort of debate. The system — whose member campuses include just about every kind of public college, in both urban and rural locations — released a statewide survey of student views on free speech and discussion at their campuses. The survey was planned in consultation both with faculty groups and with Republican legislators who have previously called for intellectual diversity legislation — thus making it difficult for either those in higher ed or those who like to criticize it to write the study off as politically fixed.
The results suggest that there may well be a problem with lack of tolerance of political views of others. But according to students (the supposed victims of intolerant professors, according to those who say there is no intellectual diversity), the problem isn’t professors, but fellow students. Only 47 percent of students reported that they believed other students were tolerant of the political views of all students, as opposed to just those whose views they supported (and of that 47 percent, only 17 percent said this was true to a great degree). About 21 percent of students feel that other students aren’t tolerant of the political views of others while the remainder are somewhat in the middle.
Follow
