Thread: College turns kids liberal?

What amazes me is that even big-shot intellectuals fall into the trap of flattening the complicated multidimensional system of politics into a unidimensional identifier: left and right.

In the US this is particularly prevalent, with the two party system. Sure you've got your odd-ball independent, but it's just a marginal phenomenon.

Originally Posted by Hillie

In the US this is particularly prevalent, with the two party system.

There isn't even a left in the US, IMO.

I don't think so...Its poppy****.

The idea that college turns students into liberals is an idea propogated by William F. Buckley in his book, God and Man at Yale and picked up by Spiro Agnew and other Nixon neo-cons in the late 1960s when you had student protests at U. S. college and university campuses about censorship on campus, racial desegregation, the Vietnam war, etc.

I have seen public opinion data generated from the 1960s by the Roper polling organization, which surveyed students as well as faculty on U. S. college and university campuses. I even wrote a short article based on that data. What the surveys found was that the majority of students and even faculty were not as "liberal" or left-wing as the public and government officials thought. The majority of students and faculty were either moderate or right of center in their attitudes towards various issues such as the Vietnam war, morality, etc. Of course, media coverage of events on campus at that time made it appear that many more students were challenging the status quo than actually were.

On a more personal note...I've been teaching in universities since the late 1970s and I can say, without equivocation, that I have rarely, if ever, seen a student steered in a radical way from the way they were when they entered.

The idea that college transforms young people is a nice idea for faux "expert" talking heads on faux news gossip shows, though. It guarantees an increased viewership for particular shows and networks and confirms the prejudices of a lot of people outside the academy who see such shows and want to believe that it is radical college faculty who are responsible for ruining the nation's young people and are responsible for college students' un-American and immoral behavior.

If any SRP members find such a college or university, please sign me up to teach there. I've been banging my head against the proverbial wall for over 30 years trying to get my students to change for the better--whatever that is, be it liberal or conservative. I can't even get them to read the daily assignment.

Originally Posted by holli4pirating

There isn't even a left in the US, IMO.

Hear, hear! What FauxNoise calls the "the Left" is a bette noir of its own imagining. Witness Glenn Beck's transition from bashing "liberals" to bashing "progressives." Isn't it interesting that he followed that meme as soon as folks ran away from "liberal" to "progressive?"