Nearly 50% of Conservative Students Have Been Subjected to Professors' Anti-Trump Rants, Survey Says
A new survey found that almost half of college students participating said they had endured an anti-Trump rant from a professor.
The College Fix asked 1,000 Republican and Republican-leaning students: “Have any of your professors gone on a tangent criticizing President Donald Trump, even if the class they teach is not related to politics/government?”
In response, 46 percent said this had happened to them; 54 percent said it had not.
The survey said the degree of Trump-bashing varied by major. Forty percent of science majors endured anti-Trump ranting. However, 53 percent of students majoring in the arts or humanities said they had a professor who trashed the president. The results were split at 50 percent for social science majors.
Towson University professor Richard Vatz told The College Fix the reason for the results “is the prevailing liberal bias in universities which hire, promote, tenure, and reward liberal applicants and professors while rejecting conservative applicants and professors.”
“I think the ranting from the left about a range of issues, which was already a fairly widespread thing given the ideological skew in college faculties, has increased substantially since the 2016 election,” Bucknell University professor Alexander Riley said. “The academic left is considerably more left than the typical Democrat outside the universities, and the level of their disbelief and panic when Trump won in 2016 was palpable.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that faculties have gotten even more left skewed in the 20 years I’ve been teaching,” he told The College Fix. “The young left faculty today are nothing like the faculty leftists I knew in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Some of them today reject altogether even the idea of civil dialogue with those with whom they disagree — I’ve seen faculty on my campus say it’s white supremacist even to ask people to be civil and refrain from using vulgarities and personal insults in academic discussions because that’s requiring ‘historically disadvantaged people’ to ‘translate’ their own idioms into white male normative idioms.”
Cabot Phillips of Campus Reform told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” the new survey was in line with expectations.
“This kind of plays into this idea of privilege which is all the rage on college campuses right now. How about liberal privilege?” he asked. “Liberal students having the privilege of professors that agree with their every idea and the privilege of knowing if they don’t speak up, it’s not a problem because the professor will speak up and give their ideas for them. That’s a privilege conservative students don’t have.”
“Professors should just be teaching students how to think critically, not what to think,” Phillips said.
“And, I think, when professors get politics out of the classroom … that’s when students can learn to think for themselves, and that’s what the goal of college should be.”
He said students kowtow to professors even when they disagree because they are “afraid of retribution.”
“[N]o student should have to choose between feeling like their ideas are some evil thing and feeling like their grade might be threatened and standing up for what they believe in,” Phillips said. “I think it’s important for us to hold it accountable when we see it.”
The College Fix survey does not stand alone. The abstract for the study “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology,” published in Econ Journal Watch, said the survey of 7,243 professors found 3,623 to be Democrats and 314 to be Republicans, a ratio of almost 12-1. The imbalance spiked among history professors at 33.5-1.
“People interested in ideological diversity or concerned about the errors of leftist outlooks — including students, parents, donors, and taxpayers — might find our results deeply troubling,” the study’s abstract said.
In 2016, Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel Abrams delved into the politics of faculty and found that the results vary by region.
“Faculty members in New England are far more liberal than their counterparts anywhere else in the nation, even controlling for discipline and school type,” he wrote in an Op-Ed in The New York Times. “In 1989, the number of liberals compared with conservatives on college campuses was about 2 to 1 nationwide; that figure was almost 5 to 1 for New England schools. By 2014, the national figure was 6 to 1; for those teaching in New England, the figure was 28 to 1.”
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