Michael Ballou couldn’t understand all the fuss. All he did was assign his political science students at Santa Rosa Junior College to write an e-mail and at the bottom include the words: “Kill the president, kill the president.”
One of the professor’s students sent his e-mail to the office of Napa Valley’s Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), which passed it on to the U.S. Capitol Police, which passed it on to the Secret Service.
The Secret Service paid Ballou a recent visit. He insisted that his e-mail assignment was misconstrued. It wasn’t that he was suggesting to his students that President Bush deserved to be killed, he claimed. He said he assigned this exercise so his students can experience “the wave of fear and paranoia” many Americans feel because of their government.
Although we cannot be sure of this professor’s political leanings, the preponderance of concern about “fear and paranoia” in America today comes from the left. Today our nation’s college campuses are overpopulated with liberal professors. It simply does not occur to them that most Americans do not share their contempt for their country.
Indeed, in a Harris Poll last year, 36 percent of Americans identified themselves as conservatives, compared to the 19 percent who described themselves as liberal. Contrast that with the survey last year by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which canvassed more than 32,000 full-time undergraduate professors. Some 48 percent identified themselves as liberal compared with a mere 18 percent that considered themselves conservative.
That ideological disparity on college campuses explains the findings of the Luntz Research Companies, which surveyed more than 150 Ivy League professors. Of those who voted in the 2000 presidential election, 84 percent cast their ballots for Al Gore, while only 9 percent voted for George W. Bush.
The hypocrisy of it all is that college administrators throughout the nation profess their commitment to “diversity” and “tolerance.” While they promote racial diversity on their campuses, while they preach tolerance of individuals who are non-white, non-male, non-Judeo-Christian, non-heterosexual, they do not practice ideological diversity in faculty hiring.
So students from the lowliest junior colleges to the loftiest Ivy League universities are subjected to liberal proselytizing. That has to be galling to parents who send their kids to college to be educated, not indoctrinated.
But that matters not to the liberal professoriate, which feels it has the right to bring its political views into the classroom. Rosalyn Kahn, a professor at Citrus College in Glendora, assigned students in her Speech 106 class to write letters to President Bush concerning the looming war with Iraq. Kahn made it clear to the students that she would give them extra credit only if they sent letters of protest rather than support.
The speech instructor’s brazen classroom politicking came to the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based campus watchdog group. It issued a complaint to Citrus College President Louis Zellers on behalf of Kahn’s students. Zellers responded by sending Bush a letter of apology. He acknowledged that Kahn “did abuse her authority.”
Zellers’ response was quite rare. Most college administrators either share the views of liberal professors or are unwilling to challenge the political activism of such professors for fear of being accused of trampling upon “academic freedom.”
That’s why non-liberal parents and non-liberal college students must become more active themselves. Unless they make their voices heard, the liberal professoriate will continue to wield disproportionate influence on the nation’s campuses.
The left leaning professors are doing a good job at creating more conservatives. I know many a college student who goes into college as a liberal and graduates as a conservative because of their idiot, biggotted biased professor who can not think for themself or only have negative opinions to express.
That’s what happened to me after having to turn in reports catering to the biases of particular professors who will fail you for not reciting their own prejudices chapter and verse. Berkeley is now working on a study that equates not wanting a welfare state with mental illness. Case closed.
Hey, I know. Affirmative action for conservative academics…quotas even. Right. If more ‘conservatives’ decided to go into academia, instead of into the ‘private’ sector of finance, think tanks, or the law, perhaps there’d be better representation. I happened to attend an extremely left-leaning school, and though I find myself on the left of many issues, certain things rankled me about the political atmosphere even then. But it’s all a swing of the pendulum folks. Returning to my school just last year, I found a somewhat different atmosphere emanating from both the student body and the faculty. That said, if you have a bright kid and send him off anywhere, from the ultra-conservative to the ultra-liberal, he’ll hopefully think for himself and develop his own worldview, no matter what. If you’re kid is a little on the slow or impressionable side, perhaps Berkeley isn’t for him.
What a bunch of double speak. Don’t try to impress us with your vocabulary impress us with your thoughts. Straight out. Whats the point of saying it was a differrent attmospere if you don’t elaborate? This is an opinion page not the puzzel page that you have to solve. FYI Conservatives are discriminated in the colleges. Ya Know that old birds of a feather thing.
Ok, I don’t believe conservatives are discriniated against in “colleges”. Which colleges, there’s thousands of them? Vanderbilt? Not true. A conservative school. I think my point about conservatives entering academia as a profession is clear…they don’t in large numbers, compared to their liberal counterparts. And if you don’t want your kids going to a liberal school, send ‘em to Sewanee or Liberty or Holy Cross, for cripes sake. My opinion is that the ‘liberals are running the madhouse’ paranoia among conservatives is completely the same as the ‘liberal owns the media’ neurosis…both are somewhat true, but WAY overblown. And idgaf, on a personal note, if you think I’m trying to ‘impress’ you with my vocabulary by using words like ‘pendulum’, I’ve got to wonder what that says for the state of your vocab.
It continues to amaze me how many supposedly intelligent people have absolutely no common sense…and this doesn’t only apply to college professors.
I don’t believe many parents send their kids to college to get a “conservative” or a “liberal” education. They just want them to get an education. The modern day campus is turning into a Leni Reifenstahl film though. Thought police, campus speech codes, “free speech zones”, secret tribunals where students don’t even get to know who their accusers are all while paying lip service to tolerance and diversity. FIRE is a great organization to read up on campus nonsense as they take up cases on merit and not political philosophy. http://www.thefire.org/index.php
Something that still angers me: the requirements at my school for an English major did not necessarily include a class on Shakespeare. You could study four years in the major, and never read a word, theoretically. There was definitely the curse of relativism in my department: this hot new Hispanic female lesbian author is just as good as the old stuff if not better. But apopletic…each school, even state schools, vary in degree of rightness or leftness…whether that’s good or bad is kind of beside the point…it just ‘is’. Thanks for the link, it’s a good one.
It was a joke as I am in England. I have went through yesterdays opinions on the Bill Press article and realized that Sandy Sings Sinatra is a college professor.