Collegiate Times

We have just recently come to the end of the longest-ever presidential campaign in history and many are rightly craving respite from competitive politics. Whether we'll actually receive such a break from these matters is anyone's guess, but we can be sure that politics, in some form, will continue to be on the radar. College students' votes were courted as never before this past season but politics does not just impact students as citizens -- as voters -- but also simply as students.

It is a commonly made point that professors are far more liberal as a group than the general public and that this fact demonstrates the political bias at work in our country's education system. There can be no dispute that the political views of professors are indeed decidedly farther to the left than those of the American people, but it is a more difficult question to determine why this is actually bad for students.

The most common view seems to be that politically partisan professors will use their bully pulpit to unfairly influence their students. A liberal professoriate, so the argument goes, will produce a liberal student body. This would be bad primarily because professors should be educating students on how to think about a variety of issues, not teaching them what to think. If students' views ultimately mirror those of their educators, then something fishy is afoot.

A recent article in The New York Times suggests that this worry should not be taken as seriously as it typically is. A new book on the topic, "Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities," informs us that professors are actually among the least influential factors in producing a student's political position, behind parents and family -- even behind peers and the media. So, if this data is to be believed, it seems the argument against political homogeneity -- which focuses on the negative impact on students -- is unpersuasive.

So, liberal professors may not indoctrinate their students into endorsing their personal political views, but perhaps there is still something problematic about liberals being overrepresented in the academy. If professors are indeed fulfilling their professional duties and teaching us how to think rather than what to think, then we should be less worried about whether students are thinking the wrong things and more about whether they're thinking about them in the wrong ways.

We might want to say that professors are not only charged with preventing their bias from seeping into their students but also with providing students with the best set of tools possible to define and defend their own political point of view. So a conservative student might be free of unfair influence from their professor while still not being fully equipped with the intellectual skill set to defend their views.

This might truly be the product of a liberal professoriate, in the sense that liberal professors are quite capable of presenting the material they deem appropriate to teach in an unbiased manner but are less capable of providing material that they deem inappropriate in a persuasive manner. So our, ironically conservative, argument for affirmative action in the academy on the grounds of political opinion might hinge less on our desire to avoid doing harm to students, and more on our desire to ensure we do the most good.

Whether liberal professors actually are less able to facilitate the intellectual endeavors of their conservative students is still a matter for debate, but we may be, at least, able to refine our concerns, or the concerns of others, when it comes to how politics impacts students.

The editorial board is composed of David Grant, Laurel Colella, David McIlroy, Sally Bull and Jackie Peters