College students would be less inclined to see their instructors as politically biased and more inclined to deal well with such bias if they were taught better communication and argumentation skills, a new study has found.
How students communicate when confronted with opposing viewpoints, the study found, has a lot to do with how likely they are to see instructors as politically biased or to react to perceptions of bias in ways that undermine their own learning. In a nutshell, students who are predisposed to verbally attack people with other viewpoints are more likely than others to perceive their instructors as ideologically biased. Students who are predisposed to enjoy a good, reasoned argument are less likely than others to react to perceptions of instructor bias by withdrawing from classroom discussions or censoring themselves to hide their true beliefs.
An article on the study, scheduled to be published in January in the journal Communication Education, argues that some perceptions of classroom bias would decline, and students would benefit more from exposure to opposing viewpoints, if colleges did more to teach argumentation and debate skills.
Teaching undergraduates such skills “can help them deal with ideological questions in the classroom and elsewhere in a civil way, and in a way that can discriminate between when professors are expressing a bias and when they are expressing a perspective that they may, or may not, actually be advocating,” said Darren L. Linvill, an assistant professor of communication at Clemson University who is one of the article’s co-authors.
The study’s findings, however, were criticized as ideologically biased themselves by Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group that has frequently accused colleges of liberal or leftist indoctrination.
The article summarizing the study, Mr. Wood said on Friday, “seems to me to have a flavor of ‘blaming the victim,’” and appears “intended to marginalize the complaints of students who have encountered bias in the classroom.”
‘A Little Backbone’
The study was conducted by Mr. Linvill and by Joseph P. Mazer, also an assistant professor of communication at Clemson. They based their analysis on the results of three separate surveys administered to a total of 226 undergraduates—45 freshmen, 65 sophomores, 84 juniors, and 32 seniors—from a randomly generated list of students enrolled at a large Southeastern university that the researchers do not name. Although the students came from just one institution, Mr. Linvill said the study’s limited scope did not matter. The study does not make generalizations about other institutions, but instead examines relationships between variables, which presumably “would be the same no matter what group of students we are looking at.”
One of the three surveys measured a trait called “argumentativeness,” a tendency to seek out, rather than avoid, situations where one can argue a point of view. The researchers characterized that trait as generally positive. A second survey measured a trait called “verbal aggression,” which the researchers characterized as generally negative. That trait was defined as a tendency to engage in ad hominem attacks or otherwise attack the self-concept of people who hold opposing views. The third survey measured how students perceive and respond to instructor bias, asking questions related to students’ general attitude toward the faculty as opposed to their experience with particular instructors.
The researchers found a substantial correlation between high scores for verbal aggressiveness and the likelihood that students would see instructors as biased. The researchers found a substantial negative correlation between high scores for argumentativeness and the likelihood that students would respond to perceived instructor bias by keeping quiet in class or offering only the answers they thought their instructors wanted to hear.
Mr. Wood took issue with how the study had characterized students. He argued that those who publicly accuse their instructors of bias might not be exhibiting any negative trait so much as “a little backbone.” While agreeing with the two Clemson researchers’ assertion that colleges should better teach students how to argue and debate, he said it is naïve to dismiss students’ fears that they will suffer repercussions for expressing views their instructors find objectionable.
“I uphold the principle of good, open discussion, but it does not stop with the assertion that this is what we want,” said Mr. Wood, who added that he hears “virtually every day” from undergraduate or graduate students who believe their grades suffered as a result of instructors’ biased responses to their classroom statements.
The Clemson researchers’ study made no effort to determine whether students’ perceptions of instructor bias were justified.
“Ultimately,” Mr. Linvill said in an interview, “it does not matter if bias in the classroom is real or perceived. It is still an issue, and it has continued to be an issue in how the public perceives us as liberal advocates living in our ivory tower at a time when so many state institutions are struggling to keep their state funding.”
