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I would have to agree with this, although some more explanation would be nice.
@Skibboleth: I don't have personal experience* (yet; I suspect this'll show up when I do my MEd) but I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down (when you aren't thrown out), which literally makes it harder to become legibly "a historian" or "an architect" as a conservative than as a progressive. If you want to see the prior ratio, you need to either enforce political neutrality in the current universities' assessments, or enforce that degrees from those universities be held to be of negligible credential value (as in, "I hired this architect because he got a Harvard degree in architecture" becomes identical in legal ramifications to "I hired this architect because he's white").
I suspect that that ratio does favour progressives, but not remotely to the current extent.
*Well, I do have personal experience that there are opportunities open to progressives and not conservatives in university, just not in the academic side - specifically, I wasn't able to become an RA in my dorm because "spread SJ propaganda" was part of the job description. Would have been nice to not have to pay rent, particularly since I was doing much of the rest of the job anyway!
I don't find this to be true except in one very particular sense: there are a subset of bigots who are also conservatives who define conservatism in terms of their own prejudices, who arrive in a space that is extremely hostile to those prejudices and find that expressing them gets them in trouble. You're not going to get marked down for saying we should lower taxes or be tougher on crime, for using nationalistic iconography, taking a pro-American stance in history class etc... If you study philosophy, there's a good chance there will be literal fascists on the curriculum. You may find yourself as a distinct minority opinion and arguing with your peers a lot, which is undeniably an unpleasant experience, but the actual landmines tend to be homophobia and racism.
Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.
Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.
If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.
In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat," and to whatever extent academics conflate the two, they ought to be called out and actively denigrated for it. The purpose of humanities education is to teach how to properly think through these moral truths (as well as other things), not what to properly conclude about these moral truths.
A sociology class that deems certain moral truths out of bounds isn't a sociology class, it's a religious sermon. Sociology can make claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it, and the teacher can even make the argument that these effects are bad, but once they cross the line into demanding that students conform to their own judgments of what's bad and good, they're taking on the role of preacher, not teacher. "Deleterious" and "wrong" are not synonyms.
In Thought Experiment Land, sure. But in the real world, it would be clear that the student had started from the bonkers conclusion and worked backwards, and I would want the teacher to mark him down, both to make it very clear to him that the claim is nonsense he should un-learn ASAP, and to teach him that you shouldn't assume the conclusion in the first place, let alone a crazy one.
That's a fair point. But to the extent it holds, to the extent that homophobia or racism are moral issues and therefore different magisteria from science - then students shouldn't be "arguing in favor of" them either - any more than teachers should be looking for the converse.
So when you wrote "arguments in favor of homophobia or racism" I assumed you meant answers to questions of fact where some claims are designated as racist or homophobic - "claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it,", as you say. "Why is Europe more successful than Africa" is a valid historical question, for example, but one for which some factual answers would be deemed racist - eg "because blacks are genetically dumber and more violent than caucasians".
(You might, of course, believe there is something to that, as a question of fact. But assuming we take the opposite to be definitive, demonstrated scientific fact on par with "the Earth is round" - or, simply, assuming the history teacher believes it to be so in good faith - then it doesn't seem to be wrong on the history teacher's part to mark down an essay which takes it to be true, no matter how eloquent it is.)
You're the one who brought us into Thought Experiment Land, though. The point of TEL is that it's analogous to the real thing we're talking about, and so I was simply explaining the analogous setup. All analogies are faulty, and so comparing Flat Earthism with racism/homophobia is also faulty, and the fact that Flat Earthism is obviously and absurdly wrong by empirical evidence is something we'd have to accept as a fault in the analogy and work around, so that the analogy makes sense, i.e. that it's entirely reasonable for someone to use best practices and best evidence to come to the conclusion of Flat Earth. This would be absurd in the real world, but, again, we're not in the real world, we're in Thought Experiment Land, by your own choice.
Hard disagree. The point of humanities is, in part, to learn to argue for squishy things like morals or politics or ideologies, and that's done in a large part by having students actually make arguments in favor of these things with the understanding that their grading isn't based on the "correctness" of their conclusions, but rather the quality of the arguments they make. This was pretty standard fair when I was in school, where, in history class, we did roleplaying to argue in favor of and against things like slavery, democracy, monarchy, and the like. Sometimes we were assigned roles, other times we chose roles based on our own preferences, and either way, the education occurred through our thinking through these arguments and we were graded on the quality of those arguments. I think this is a good thing and useful for students to learn. This goes double for concepts and ideas that are well outside the Overton window and specifically ones that people in authority find offensive or dangerous.
Right, if the history teacher is assuming this to be true, in good faith, that speaks to a truly horrific level of incompetence and bias by the history teacher, in terms of epistemic certainty about history or sociology or the humanities in general. There are very few things in reality that are as well demonstrated as "the Earth is round," and any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar. Anyone with any appreciation for academia, and especially one whose role is to teach students, ought to be aware of this. Especially if we're considering a case where the history teacher is judging the veracity of claims like "Europe is more successful than Africa because [XYZ]" based on the fact that [XYZ] was deemed to be racist, rather than on the specific scientific claims of [XYZ] and the empirical evidence surrounding it, which seemed to be the implication in the original situation and is certainly the case in most such cases I've observed both in and outside of academic settings.
The point of my thought experiment was to demonstrate that in principle there can be cases where it's correct for a humanities teacher to mark down a student based on the positions they hold, and not just the quality of the argument. I'm not convinced that "any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar". Perhaps bringing HBD into it confused the issue - suppose a student handed in a paper arguing that the pyramids were built by Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta. Wouldn't that be pretty analogous to the flat-earther geology student? Wouldn't you want a serious history teacher to mark down the paper relative to an equally-eloquent one that presented a basically sane theory of the pyramids' origin?
This is probably the crux of our differing views on the history-teacher thought experiment. The way I see it, for better or for worse, "HBD is noxious pseudoscience on par with flat-Earth and ancient aliens" has been successfully taught to a vast majority of the population. That is, in fact, what HBD advocates complain about. So long as it's the case, it's not a random humanities teacher's responsibility to buck against that. We can't expect him to know that all mainstream geneticists in the country are participating in a vast conspiracy to suppress a genuine controversy, any more than it's his job to guess whether NASA is faking space imagery of the round Earth. If there is blame to be assigned, it goes to the architects of the conspiracy, not to people in unrelated fields who go by the mainstream scientific consensus. And if you go by the mainstream scientific consensus, then "racism explains Africa's subpar development" is trivially false and dangerous misinformation, in the same way as "the Earth is flat".
I'd want the serious history teacher to mark down the paper only if the argument that the Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta built it was truly bad. Which should almost definitely be the case, if we're in reality. If it is the case that, somehow, the student was able to form an argument based on the best available empirical evidence and best available analysis using the best available methods that was exactly as rigorous and fact-based as another student's argument that it was built by Egyptian slaves or whatever, then I'd want the history teacher to give that student the same grade. I don't know why you write "eloquent" in this example, when eloquence has almost nothing to do with the quality of an argument.
Perhaps my assignment of blame to the history teacher was more severe than is warranted. If it is indeed the case that the entire field of history (or humanities in general) is so biased that any typical history teacher can't be reasonably held to account for believing the bias, this speaks to even more horrific levels of incompetence in the entire field. What you're describing is a situation that's similar to what I described, but severely worse. As in, to refer back to my earliest comment in this thread, the situation in academia is even worse than the worst things that people here were criticizing with respect to ideological bias in academia and similar institutions.
What's unfortunate is, I think you're probably right on this.
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When you say you don't "find" this to be true, are you saying you're involved with this personally in some fashion?
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I think you should be more specific about the subset you have in mind.
My first thought was “Civil Rights era Southern Democrats,” a group which unapologetically grounded their racism in conservative thought. But those people are mostly dead now, and their legacy is a good bit more complicated.
If you’re accusing Bob Jones fundamentalists or scientific racists or based post-Christian vitalists of confusing prejudice for conservatism, you’ve got to do more work to establish it.
It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.
Russ Roberts talks about the reaction he gets when he talks about some pretty basic free market economics. I know he's told a story where he used the phrase "they edge away from you". I think it had to do with minimum wage. I may or may not have also gotten the phrase "they stare at you like you're an alien" from him, which I used here, in context of a not-even-boundary-pushing sort of take on sexuality. Perhaps the moment has passed, because the political battles have been won, but at the peak of the cultural pressure cooker, trying desperately to win the political battle, it really was the case that even the most mild doubt of the Dogmatic Position was heavily disfavored.
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This is literally just that one reddit meme that they change every time there's a new sacred cow
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Do you want some gun rights examples? Because oh boy do I have gunnie examples; shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?
Even for gender/sexuality, the progressive taboos are far more often dependent on matters that are not controversial, or worse are only controversial to the opposing direction. There’s fair argument against misgendering a trans school shooter, but it’s not some universal standard, and people did still lose literal careers over (liking a tweet that did) it.
This was construed as supporting a murderous racist, not just a pro-guns position.
Yes. Yes it was.
Falsely.
I’m not gonna say that’s an exception the swallows the rule on its own. The wrong position on the ACA or AWB might be cited as wanting to kill poor people, before found justification for firing, and there’s other times where positions are seen themselves as evidence of disqualificating in capability, such as where just having the wrong background had an academic review board talk about ‘beating that college out of her’ (and, tot’s coincidence, not hiring her) . Of course, most stuff gravitates to race and sexuality as most controversial, regardless of the facts on the ground, and especially if Skibboleth is trying to distinguish ‘criminal justice’ and ‘immigration’, that makes for a self-parody. An RPG forum I once frequented formally banned any support of ICE or defense of antiabortion laws (and informally banned any serious criticism of BLM); there is no position that modern progressives will fail to call racist or sexist or both.
But let’s look again at Skibboleths claim:
Not ‘understood as’. Not ‘painted as’. Is.
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It is in fact often about immigration and criminal justice.
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I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.
A weirdo leftist failing to get you banned for sharing a conservative opinion seems like evidence in favor of my point.
The amount of pushback on the leftist was zero. I didn't get banned this time, but I can't risk continuing to talk about it either.
And it's not hard to find places where being open about right wing political beliefs unambiguously gets people banned.
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In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.
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