Nearly half of conservative students say professors rant against President Trump
Nearly half of conservative college students say they have experienced professors, especially those majoring in arts, humanities and social sciences, going off topic to rant against President Donald Trump, according to a recent poll by College Pulse.
The poll which was commissioned by The College Fix and conducted in November asked 1,000 Republican and Republican-leaning students: “Have any of your professors gone on a tangent criticizing President Donald Trump, even if the class they teach is not related to politics/government?”
Some 46% of the students responded “yes, they have,” while 54% said “no, they have not.”
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Only 40% of students majoring in the sciences reported their professors ranting against the president while 53% and 50% of students majoring in the arts and humanities and social sciences, respectively, reported their professors going off on a tangent to speak out about the president.
“Yeah it’s kind of annoying. Whatever side you’re on, I came to learn about anything but a professors political opinions,” a student from North Carolina State University wrote in response to the question in a section that allowed respondents to comment.
“CU boulder is a great spot if you want to hear bulls*** from professors about how bad this country is. Literally had one teacher cry in class when he [Trump] got elected. I payed to learn, not hear propaganda from professors,” wrote another student from the University of Colorado Boulder.
“I had a professor in a history course who would point out every moment in American history that proves Trump’s tactics are not unprecedented. He also made it clear with numerous historical examples that the media has nearly sole control over the public’s opinion of anything and anyone, including presidents. All that being said, I don’t know if he was for or against Trump because he somehow did a solid job at not taking any perspective to an emotional level,” added another student from Ohio State University.
A numbers of studies in recent years have raised concern about progressive bias among professors at many of America’s prestigious colleges and universities.
Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business management at Brooklyn College found strong evidence of this in a study of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report. Langbert found that there are more than ten Democrats for every one Republican among elite professors. And in religion departments, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 70 to 1. A similar trend toward the left among academia was also observed in Britain.
"Political homogeneity is problematic because it biases research and teaching and reduces academic credibility," Langbert wrote in his findings published by the National Association of Scholars. "... Even though more Americans are conservative than liberal, academic psychologists' biases cause them to believe that conservatism is deviant."
Bucknell University Professor Alexander Riley, who has faced criticism for his advocacy of viewpoint diversity and free speech on college campuses, told The College Fix that the progressive bias has gotten worse over the last 20 years.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that faculties have gotten even more left skewed in the 20 years I’ve been teaching,” he said. “The young left faculty today are nothing like the faculty leftists I knew in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Some of them today reject altogether even the idea of civil dialogue with those with whom they disagree–I’ve seen faculty on my campus say it’s white supremacist even to ask people to be civil and refrain from using vulgarities and personal insults in academic discussions because that’s requiring ‘historically disadvantaged people’ to ‘translate’ their own idioms into white male normative idioms.”
