To the Editor:
Donald Lazere invents absurd claims for his opponents (“The Contradictions of Cultural Conservatism in the Assault on American Colleges,” The Chronicle Review, July 2). For example, he writes that conservative “culture warriors ... do not dare admit that the greatest detriment to humanistic education is the commercial pressure imposed by corporations.” ... Such thinking is common among those who rely on grand conspiracies to explain world events. They know that a member of the conspiracy can never admit its true nature, and that anyone who won’t admit the conspiracy’s true nature is a member.
According to Lazere, there is a grand conspiracy that is responsible for having “saturated” most students “in corporate ideology.” It’s a cabal comprising large corporations along with the coy conservatives, university administrators and trustees, wider pop culture (including “pop music, movies, TV, talk radio, and fashion,” even though some of them “may have ostensibly liberal messages”), and parents, especially the fundamentalist Christian ones. Truly a pervasive conspiracy, in which the Ford Foundation, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Ma and Pa Baptist move in concert! ...
Lazere spends several passages on his Everystudent, Richard, the Limbaugh listener whom he rescued by teaching him the scholastic value of investigating primary sources. But then Lazere discards primary sources, specifically “the pious avowals by conservatives of Horowitz’s ilk that they are concerned to preserve academic freedom for liberals and conservatives alike,” in favor of his own suspicion that the conservatives have an unstated “cynical intent to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death.” Say, who’s being cynical?
An optimist would surmise from Lazere’s anecdote about Richard and the news of Lazere’s forthcoming book on argumentative rhetoric that perhaps the old chestnut holds here: Those who can’t do, teach.
Jon Sanders Policy Analyst Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Raleigh, N.C.
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To the Editor:
The goal of David Horowitz’s “academic bill of rights” is quite simple: to codify the objectives of academic freedoms that the American Association of University Professors set forth almost a century ago. Students have the right to be graded fairly on the content of their work, not according to the political bias that is prevalent in today’s higher-education system. The model legislation of the American Legislative Exchange Council does not call for an affirmative-action-like hiring of conservative academic professors, nor does it call for an increased curriculum. On the contrary, the bill aims to ensure that professors provide an academic environment that allows students to freely discuss and learn any topic, free of conservative or liberal bias in grading their work. ...
I have no reason to doubt that professors like Donald Lazere “bend over backward to encourage [students’] views and to be more than fair in grading.” However, is it responsible to assume that all professors offer such a fair learning environment? ... University students across the country continue to bring forth evidence of biased grading, so-called debates that present a single perspective, and a general lack of intellectual diversity. The higher-education system should take their concerns seriously. Even though thousands of fair professors teach our college students, hundreds of professors try to impose their religious and political beliefs on students.
Make no mistake, I agree with many of the points that Mr. Lazere puts forth. Traditional college students, especially those beginning their first year, have not yet developed “critical-thinking skills to cope with complex ideas of any ideological variety,” and I agree that a “major source of cognitive dissonance is not liberal ideas versus conservative ones but complex ideas versus simplistic ones.”
I believe, however, that students attend college to acquire those skills, not just to gain a trade. I applaud Mr. Lazere for challenging Richard -- the rural, Rush-loving Republican -- with alternate views and texts. ... But Richard should be challenged with both opposite views and free-market texts. Only with a balance of information can he take an informed stance.
Intellectual diversity is the core of a solid, challenging education. It can be found only where the free exchange of differing views is a fundamental freedom. The “academic bill of rights” would ensure that students in our nation’s higher-education system have the freedom to openly discuss varying beliefs, thereby learning from others’ positions, without the fear of a bad grade.
Lori Drummer Director Education Task Force American Legislative Exchange Council Washington
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To the Editor:
I applaud Donald Lazere’s essay. ... For eight years I taught at a small, Midwestern state college where everything was exactly as he describes it. ... In every class I taught or observed, a number of students with outspoken conservative views tended to dominate discussions. They were rarely challenged by other students and never attacked -- in any way, shape, or form -- by professors.
I am a now a professor of English at a public university on the West Coast with a reputation for liberalism, and I still agree with Lazere’s every point. Perhaps many, but certainly not all, college professors are liberal Democrats in their everyday lives; they nonetheless turn into very conservative academics the minute they walk into the classroom. ... Many professors believe in a quasi-journalistic, pseudo-objective ethos in their dealings with students. Hence they will overcompensate for their own political beliefs, which they regard as personal, whenever they encounter in a typical class a number of students with outspoken conservative views. Students with conservative views are usually treated with elaborate deference. ...
Lazere’s final point is therefore a keen one. If there is something causing students who hold conservative viewpoints to complain “to conservative watchdog organizations about unpatriotic or coercive professors,” it is an anxiety produced by something other than their treatment at the hands of real professors. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect it might have something to do with the “cognitive dissonance” Lazere mentions in connection with students who cannot understand complex ideas. To concentrate, reflect, seek out sources, compare, analyze, discuss, and argue -- in writing as well as speech -- maybe it all adds up to something that is just too weird these days, too far removed from discourse in everyday American life.
To try to protect some nugget of humanistic essence in the university from its true antagonists, the cultural reactionaries, I don’t think that Lazere needs to point at deconstruction. ... When he points at the disingenuity and cynicism of David Horowitz et al., however, and their desire to unleash forces of ignorance rather than of light, with the goal of “hounding liberal academics to death,” I fear that Lazere is not overdramatically, but exactly, right.
David Stacey Professor of English Humboldt State University Arcata, Calif.
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To the Editor:
In reading criticisms of conservatives by liberal thinkers, I have noticed that the motives of conservatives are consistently attacked. Donald Lazere makes a fairly typical statement: “I have little doubt that, beneath the pious avowals by conservatives of Horowitz’s ilk that they are concerned to preserve academic freedom for liberals and conservatives alike, lies the cynical intent to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death.” Where is his evidence for this belief? Hasn’t he just lamented the ignorance of his conservative students, who hold beliefs that they can’t support by “evidence or experience”? ...
Lazere’s criticisms ultimately reinforce Horowitz’s position: that bias prevents many academics from weighing facts dispassionately and considering arguments on their merits. If admitting unbiased discourse back into the academy would result in liberal academics’ being “hounded to death,” liberals would have only themselves to blame.
Kay Fiset Director Credit Programs Syracuse University Syracuse, N.Y.
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To the Editor:
Donald Lazere is apparently a skilled faculty member who exposes his undeveloped conservative students to challenging ideas designed to stimulate critical thinking. But he is naïve if he fails to recognize that large numbers of faculty members simply teach watered-down liberalism devoid of any critical analysis. ...
Also, what about the undeveloped liberal student who arrives on campus fresh from high school espousing simplistic blather about diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism -- the student who is critical of everything but can’t tell you why? I hope Professor Lazere exposes these students to the same high-quality literature designed to develop their critical thinking.
Donald G. Ellis Professor of Communication University of Hartford West Hartford, Conn.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 49, Page B4