Bias In Institutions of Higher Learning

I'm a centrist by the way, as are most who are called "far right"

Thanks for a good laugh
A centrist compared to who exactly?

I refuse to believe that a liberal arts college is an institution of higher learning.

The biasness is expected anyway. Liberal arts has no set procedure as to what material should be taught and and how. Bias interpretations are expected.

You could very well go into a philosophy class and expect your professor to lean towards teaching one side, slanted or material he/she likes. But philospohy is worthless, like many other liberal arts. Walk into a math class and I bet you anything that in other classes like it, the same material is being taught without any bias. Because I doubt the professor will say something like 'I am not going to teach you algorithms because Nappier was a Democrat.'

If you want to whine bitch and complain, liberal arts is for you. But, if you want to be educated and debate topics, try business, engineering or science.

No argument there olde man..

Thanks,
Orangetom

Originally posted by xmotex

I'm a centrist by the way, as are most who are called "far right"

Thanks for a good laugh

A centrist compared to who exactly?

Oh?....... you've not heard of that term? It's someone who believes in the Bill of Rights, and The Constitution, as they were written.

Originally posted by Frosty
I refuse to believe that a liberal arts college is an institution of higher learning.

The biasness is expected anyway. Liberal arts has no set procedure as to what material should be taught and and how. Bias interpretations are expected.

You could very well go into a philosophy class and expect your professor to lean towards teaching one side, slanted or material he/she likes. But philospohy is worthless, like many other liberal arts. Walk into a math class and I bet you anything that in other classes like it, the same material is being taught without any bias. Because I doubt the professor will say something like 'I am not going to teach you algorithms because Nappier was a Democrat.'

If you want to whine bitch and complain, liberal arts is for you. But, if you want to be educated and debate topics, try business, engineering or science.

Ah..... John Galt. Good read, wasn't it? Very informative! 8^)

www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org...

...... and that (in the link) is supposed to be helping someone gain insight and knowledge?...... of what?

Another example might be:
file:///e:/A%20MAIL/Bias%20Colleges/Ward%20Churchill%20Is%20Just%20The%20Beginning.htm

This is what our tax dollars are helping to fund? The guy is so far left he's horizontal!

I agree ..this is what passes for education now days???

The history and knowlege of which I have grasped..declares that we dont describe and define who and what we are by our sexuality. What we are and where we are going ..is so much more than mere sexuality.
For anyone to declare openly before me that thier main intrest and standard by which they define themselves is sex and sexuality is to declare that they have wasted thier education.

Furthermore a proper person ..is defined by three things. Thier lineage...thier decendents. Thier occupation/occupations or some great work they have done and left to posterity.

THe kind of dumbness reflected upon in your first article in your last post can only survive in a cloistered enviornment of university because most people who work hard for a living and take real risks with their lives and moneys earned know better than this. Yet we allow this to "shine" as a standard of excellence when real educated people know better.

I shouldnt be but am often astonished by how little thinking is going on out here.

I am getting ready to post a opinion here on the Education and Media forum under the heading " how to control people" . I would be intrested to see what you think of it.

Thanks,
Orangetom

Originally posted by orangetom1999
I agree ..this is what passes for education now days???

The history and knowlege of which I have grasped..declares that we dont describe and define who and what we are by our sexuality. What we are and where we are going ..is so much more than mere sexuality.
For anyone to declare openly before me that thier main intrest and standard by which they define themselves is sex and sexuality is to declare that they have wasted thier education.

Furthermore a proper person ..is defined by three things. Thier lineage...thier decendents. Thier occupation/occupations or some great work they have done and left to posterity.

THe kind of dumbness reflected upon in your first article in your last post can only survive in a cloistered enviornment of university because most people who work hard for a living and take real risks with their lives and moneys earned know better than this. Yet we allow this to "shine" as a standard of excellence when real educated people know better.

I shouldnt be but am often astonished by how little thinking is going on out here.

I am getting ready to post a opinion here on the Education and Media forum under the heading " how to control people" . I would be intrested to see what you think of it.

Thanks,
Orangetom

For the most part, the "students" not in specialties do only enough thnking to get by.

Ahhhh.... control... Ill look forward to reading your Op-Ed.

If you can, U2U me when you get it posted. Thanks for the comments.

[edit on 10-1-2006 by zappafan1]

You can look at the political affiliations of faculty members, but I don't think that gets to the real problems in academia. Academia is dependent teaches theories of how the world works. The problem is that a good sounding theory need not be an accurate theory. Academics spread theories that sound good, but often aren't practical, accurate, or useful. We say something is an "academic exercise", when it will lead to obscure to some innate theoretical understanding without any practical purpose.

Academics promote their theories, and claim that no one belongs in any profession that doesn't understand their theories. They can successfully lobby high level bureacrats, who like academics are often highly isolated from the outcomes of their decisions. Degree systems work to restrict sectors of the economy to those educated in certain academic theories.

Certain theories sound more appealing, and those theories are adopted by academics. I think this accounts for whatever political bias there is. The thing is that professors in a position for very successful brainwashing. One of the most successful classic brainwashing technique is to hold an essay contest. Participants often alter their essays slightly to conform to the readers views, so they have a better chance of winning. Psychologically, you are more likely to believe in what you have written. The process works best when you believe you have freedom to write whatever you want, and the prize is relatively small. Most college classes virtually mirror these conditions. Term papers consist of essays where students are motivated by grades to bias their paper at least slightly toward the professors POV. If the student, has multiple professors with similar views over time they are likely to adopt a view more closely aligned with the professor.

Not only is there bias in the classroom in colleges and universities but material is taught and presented in a very bad manner at times.

One example: I have enrolled in Sociology. This is a two year college I attend and the professor there is a tenured member and has scene the college grow to its current size of 25k students at 3 campuses from when it was only a few thousand and she in fact help start the first distance learning classes, etc etc. So you have the idea that she is not only tenured but very active, but I think she really mislead the class the otherday and I hope that this is something she has not been stating every year that she has taught.

After taking roll she asks the class: 'Who was Isaac Newton and what did he do?'. My immediate thought was 'Mathematician and physicist who invented (should have thought"developed") calculus and made various advances in the fields of physics such as heat, mechanics, light, etc. The class concensus though was 'he was a physicist who had a theory about gravity'. I can buy that conclusion despite the fact he was so much more and did so much more.

She then states 'so he was the first to develop and explain with a theory the nature of gravity and what it is'. Well, not exactly I thought. Much of what he knew about gravity came from Copernicus. But he did develop calculus to better explain physics, so I can buy it. What she was aiming at was addressing to the class the of theory and to give an example of what a theory is. I had a problem with this: she did not explain what Newton's theory of gravity is. She never stated the inverse square law, constant rate of fall or any of the math. But I did not believe the next statement.

"Theories are neither proven and are meant to be disproven". I was so surprised. I know that theories proven in physical sciences may have exceptions and may not always be constant/proven and can be disproven from time to time. But in math it is different, something proven is always the same.

I know that she was implying theories pertaining to sociology but I think she addressed it in such a bad manner. She should have defined the differences between sociology, a social science, and physics, a math based physical science. I think she mislaed the class. Could there be students in the class who took that to heart about theories not being proven because that is what they were taught by her?

All I know is that I had a problem with it...needed to get it off my chest.

Here's a few more descriptions of what you (Frosty and orangetom1999) and I are saying, and are indicative of the problem. Tolerance, understanding, diversity and the fear of "offending" someone are undermining the futures of many, many children:

www.spectator.org...

(edit for added content)

[edit on 25-1-2006 by zappafan1]

Originally posted by Frosty
"Theories are neither proven and are meant to be disproven".

I was so surprised. I know that theories proven in physical sciences may have exceptions and may not always be constant/proven and can be disproven from time to time. But in math it is different, something proven is always the same.

Mathematics is not science, and so it is different. In mathematics, you prove theorems, not theories. Fundamentally, a theory is just a formalized way of explaining something. Science attempts to test theories. The traditional method is to break down the theory into simple testable statements, and then combine the statements into a theory. That way, every statement can be easily testable. In modern science, we often apply statistical techniques to understand the siginificance of our observations. Newer theories often describe things to greater accuracy or at the limits of previous observations.

However, for complex disciplines, it isn't really always so easy to break things down into simple statements. Furthermore, simple statements can be deceptive. For instance, some have pointed out that the classical conservation of energy law, doesn't really hold. The law has been kept the same, but the definition of energy has evolved, so the law keeps working(I.E. e=mc^2). There have been various mathematical theories to deal with complexity, and some have gone so far to claim there is some sort of fundamental order to the universe.

However, most of the social sciences involve things that are too complex to easily test or model. So, we have to rely on intuitive notions to try to make sense of things. We improve these notions by finding flaws in our current understanding.

At first glance, this may appear different from the physical sciences, but the distinction is not entirely clear. For instance, the theory of gravity couldn't be fully formulated without first accepting that the earth revolved around the sun. This required rejecting what was at the time an intuitive notion. At the same time, Newton expanded gravity from the surface of the earth to the whole universe, which basically increased the scope of previous theories.

The thing that can make theories deceptive is when they explain much more than their explanations can justify. This is especially easy with complex phenomenon, becuase you often lack sufficient data, or analysis capability to formulate theories that can more or less explain all observed data. So, bad theories can be accepted, which is often encouraged through some form of propoganda.

Originally posted by crontab

I don't know much math, but I do believe it to be a science, a very abstract science, just not physical.

know the difference between a theory and a theorem except that my lack of math may aco# for miskewed understanding that theories can be proven, and then are called theorems. I am not sure if this is correct but that is to the best of my understanding.

But I just had a beef with my professor ignoring me when I said several times that Newton was a mathematician and that he developed calculus. It couldn't have hurt her to write 'Mathematician' and 'calculus' on the board. OR else I gave her an answer she was not expecting and probably had no clue that Newton was a mathematician who developed calculus.

The postings on free speech on college campuses...is such a irony.

Looking back historically...during the days of the Vietnam war..students on colleges were big on free speech and not being muzzled by the establishment. Ironically ...now that they are the establishment they do the very thing they protested about during their college days.
What a 180 degree turn about.

It is becoming more and more known that this type of open bias and control mechanism works best in a cloistered enviornment like a college or the body politic. The problems they are having is that the students are now using the widened media to vent thier dissapproval of how the colleges are heavily biased.
Nevertheless it is ironic how things come full circle and yet dont change. Most likely I would not survive college again with the caliber of many of the professors now days.

Thanks,
Orangetom

".... The postings on free speech on college campuses...is such a irony.

Looking back historically...during the days of the Vietnam war..students on colleges were big on free speech and not being muzzled by the establishment. Ironically ...now that they are the establishment they do the very thing they protested about during their college days."

REPLY: Well, even back then it was about freedom of THEIR speech.... not anyone with an opposing viewpoint. Interesting to note that all of the college riots and protests were fomented by Communist infiltrators; something we found out about when the ols Soviet Union collapsed, and they made all sorts of paperwork available to the U.S. The V.N. war was against a Stalinist-style Communism, which the liberals of the era were for. Now many of those same students are teaching in our universities.

".... It is becoming more and more known that this type of open bias and control mechanism works best in a cloistered enviornment like a college or the body politic. The problems they are having is that the students are now using the widened media to vent thier dissapproval of how the colleges are heavily biased.
Nevertheless it is ironic how things come full circle and yet dont change. Most likely I would not survive college again with the caliber of many of the professors now days."

REPLY: No matter what your political leanings are, it is starting to become very interesting in our "institutions of higher learning" because the first wave of the "Limbaugh Kids" are entering college, and will be very vocal as to the propaganda taught there and the views of the professors..... which is a good thing.