University is a place for advanced learning. An important tenet of University life, however, is the opportunity for people of different races, nationalities and backgrounds to interact, share and debate ideas, and build relationships that last for years and even generations. At least, that was what it used to be.
What we see nowadays is a different story. Now, most universities tend to pursue policies that fall towards the political left. Gross and Simmons in their study show that the political leanings of academics today are mostly leftist, despite the fact that the larger society does not have that high a percentage of people who consider themselves to be on the political left.
“Most academics lean politically to the left”
I would argue that everyone learns to think like their university lecturers, teachers and mentors. Herein lies the problem: if most academics and university hierarchy lean politically left, students are only exposed to the left side of arguments on policy and political issues and aren’t exposed to a range of views before making decisions. What this does is to make them dismiss other people’s political views as “crazy”, “extreme”, “useless”, thereby making many of tomorrow’s leaders out of touch with their community at a very young age.
Cory Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, was invited to speak at the Oxford University Union. It was obvious that even before the man had a chance to talk that the students had no interest in listening to him. To them, he was stupid, an extremist. How dare he come here? The smug way in which they derided him was amazing to behold. One of the questions asked of him was, and I am paraphrasing here:
“Why do you think Trump should have hired you when you have been a failure in your career all along?”
What?!
“Have you ever taken a political campaign to international recognition before?”
Turns out he has had some political success in the past. On top of that, the meeting was held after Trump won the 2016 American election in a campaign which Corey Lewandowski helped bring to international attention. To the eyes of the Oxford students, however, he was a failure! Insane! Have you ever taken a campaign that was written off from the start to international recognition before?
And to top it off recently was the riot at the University of California, Berkeley, because a right-wing speaker Milo Yiannopolous was scheduled to speak on their campus. The irony is that in the 1960s, the free speech movement started in the same university to give audience to people with different views. Now, in 2017, the story is the prohibition of people who do not share your political views. Insane!
Of course, the end result was that Yiannopolous ended up gaining international coverage and exposure.
If the political left-turning of universities is not swiftly corrected, we have got a huge problem on our hands for the coming generation.
Olufisayo Olanrewaju
image: Onasill Bill Badzo via Flickr
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Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe those people who are internationally renowned experts at the top of the intellectual ladder might actually know what they’re on about, considering part of being a brilliant academic at least in the Arts and Social Sciences (I doubt this is as relevant to STEM) is staying on top of current affairs, analysing them on both a popular and minutiae scale in order to not only explain but to critique what’s going on?
Considering these are the people who make a living out of this, surely it’s their responsibility to hold to account those movements that they view as bad for society, because, lets face it: even on a purely pragmatic look at the cold hard economics of current politics the right isn’t exactly doing a great job are they? And thus it falls to the academics who actually tend to have a much broader, fuller and better thought out understanding of how society actual functions to offer their valuable insight into how things can be improved. But I guess in a post-truth world, the actual nitty gritty things such as facts don’t matter do they?
I don’t think the issue lies necessarily in left-leaning views themselves (though the writer could have been clearer about this) but in the fact that a certain faction of the left are being dismissive of and mocking differing political opinions as opposed to attempting to change them (or even learn from them) through proper discussion and debate