Complaints of liberal bias often arise over a college’s choice of reading assignment over the summer for new freshmen. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington State University, for example, have been the targets of such criticism in recent years.
Now a scholarly group says it has more than anecdotal evidence that such a bias exists and is pervasive.
The National Association of Scholars says it looked at common-reading selections for this summer at 290 colleges and universities and found that 70 percent of the books “either explicitly promote a liberal political agenda or advance a liberal interpretation of events.”
The association’s report, “What Do Colleges Want Students to Read Outside Class?,” also faults the assignments as insufficiently intellectually challenging.
The report includes a series of recommendations, advising colleges to select classic works and avoid books that “cheerlead for popular causes or reinforce a political sensibility.”
Alix Schwartz, director of academic planning at the University of California at Berkeley, defended the common-reading assignments as a starting point from which students explore a variety of views. The books are not chosen to indoctrinate students with a particular viewpoint, but are intended as a means of providing students with a common basis for dialogue, she said.
“It’s a way of starting an intellectual conversation,” said Ms. Schwartz. “We certainly don’t think the book is the last word on any subject. It’s the first word.”
Berkeley’s reading selection for the 2009-10 academic year, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, was identified in the report’s book list as promoting environmentalism and animal rights. Ms. Schwartz said that the university had engaged students about the book through faculty discussions, freshman seminars, expert lectures, and panels.
“It’s not a monolithic thing, where everyone bows down to Michael Pollan,” she said.
Some colleges allow their incoming freshman to choose from among more than one book. San Diego State University, for example, sponsors both the Common Experience program, whose 2010 theme is specifically centered on social justice, and the One Book, One San Diego program, which engages the entire San Diego community and has no such theme. In its study, however, the association included only the Common Experience book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, by Ray Anderson.
The association’s president, Peter Wood, said that the study had considered all programs that were not for academic credit. “We were looking for programs that were general to the public,” he said.