Higher Education and Liberal Indoctrination

There is an interesting article about liberal views on college campuses seeking to address the question, “Does college make students more liberal?”   It is written by several college professors, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and promoted by Ohio State and North Carolina State Universities.

With that understanding, it is not all that surprising that they find that students are not that much more liberal after four years of college.  However, their only measure of this concerns student attitudes towards liberal and conservative leaders.

Through our analysis of 3,486 students at 116 U.S. colleges and universities, we found that students’ positive attitudes toward political conservatives were largely the same when they started college and four years later. Compared to their responses in fall of 2015, graduating college seniors in the spring of 2019 were just as likely to report that political conservatives made positive contributions to society and were ethical people. Similarly, they were also just as likely to say that they had things in common with – and had positive attitudes toward – political conservatives.

However, those views were at or below 50 percent during their four years of college. This is contrasted with Liberals having a 70 percent positive view among those students at the end of four years, after having started at 58 percent positive as Freshmen. The study’s authors concede that students’ attitudes steadily grow more positive toward liberalism the longer they are in school.

It is possible that many students are predisposed toward liberalism by the time they graduate from High School and that college is just a natural leftward progression. I think it is also possible that many students are deeply engrained postmodernists who struggle with making judgements about any particular worldview as being true when asked to compare and judge people from differing camps.

What we do know is that the balance if college professors is heavily slanted to the left. A study earlier this year found that for every 1 professor who makes a political donation to a Republican candidate, 95 other profs made a donation to a Democrat. The same study found that of the 12,372 college professors studied, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 8 to 1.

This article was originally published at AFA of Indiana.