String ‘Em Up by Their Ponytails
In a recent O’Reilly “Mad as Hell” segment, a student-viewer expressed his anger at being unable to voice his conservative views in the college classroom without fear of reprisal from his liberal professors.
Think about that for a moment. We send our youth to college so that they can lead more productive and lucrative lives, to become contributing citizens who help weave more strength into the fabric of this nation. In that context, every stout thread has value, whether it warps left or right.
And the key word in that sentence is “value,” and even more particularly, “future value.”
Now consider that in many personal injury lawsuits, a key factor in establishing damages against a defendant is the degree to which his actions have limited the future earnings of the plaintiff. By that measure, very large amounts can be calculated that juries must weigh in the process of redressing the wrong. This is one reason why so many medical malpractice judgments and awards are so large.
Now gather those two truths into one line of thinking: those pursuing college degrees are doing so in order to better their life experience, and the best way to do that is to increase one’s earning ability. And since one’s college transcript can be a decisive determinant in the hiring process, those who control what ends up in that transcript have a definite influence and impact on any student’s career path and earning capacity.
Test case: a former paratrooper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is pursuing a degree in an American university, and he finds that his world and political views, formed on the basis of his extensive on-the-ground, life-and-death experiences and participation in key world events, are considered unacceptable and unworthy to the gray-ponytailed remnants of Woodstock who reign in the classrooms, the limp, life-impotent wimps totally lacking in similar real-life experiences, who conduct his courses. And because those old failed and fading hippies find his views offensive to their own hard-left positions, his classwork is shaded in the shadow of their political bias. An otherwise perfectly well-reasoned paper is D-graded or even failed because the premise offends the political sensibilities of the ponytailed Bolsheviks.
At the end of four years, what is the effect of those politically determined grades on the overall numeric accounting of that soldier’s scholastic performance? If the effect is to drop the grade point average from A to B — or worse, A to C or even D — how does that appear to those who will then be using that grade from that transcript to form their initial opinions in granting that applicant an interview?
Have those liberal professors not had a direct negative impact on that young veteran’s ability to be hired? Have they not had a direct negative impact on his ability to maximize his earning ability? Of course they have.
So I suggest that people in the soldier’s position sue the offending school for the loss of future earnings. If multiple suits of this nature are filed, it will take only one courtroom success to set all the loss-prevention specialists at universities all over the country to pondering their future financial threat. From that point I cannot predict, but knowing the reflexively defensive nature of these institutions to anything that threatens their financial bases, some changes will surely be made.
Will such changes end the problem? Nope, not entirely, but they will unquestionably ensconce a watchful, wary administrative eye over the classroom conduct and the course grading of that gray-ponytailed communist cohort who presently contaminates the campus. When such lefties become a legal liability to their employing institutions, their own future employment and earning capabilities become problematic.
Will some stout Iraq-Afghanistan veteran out there going to college on G.I. benefits and facing this kind of leftist oppression please file the first precedent-setting suit? Or better yet, a graduate who was low-graded by his leftist professors and who has found that the low grading has had impact on his hirability? One win is all it will take to begin the change to this perversity that now pollutes honest educating all across this country.
Veteran, G.I. Bill status will lend great weight to the truth of a plaintiff’s claim to exposing ongoing injustice in the educational environment. I know, I know — as an old soldier myself, never, never volunteer, but some courageous warrior needs to stand tall for himself and his vast Band of Brothers whose post-combat careers should not be limited and diminished by these hellish covens of tenure-protected pinko professors.
Dare I suggest they be strung up by their ponytails?
Crossposted at American Thinker
Category: Schools, Veterans Issues
The other option is to attend a conservative university. Usually private, and usually expensive, but it is an option for those who have neither the time nor the money to fight an open-ended legal battle for possibly years with no end in sight, possibly right up to the steps of the Supreme Court.
Why on Earth file something?
I had to, for my degree in sociology, take a class, whose name I don’t remember, but the content of which I cannot forget. Basically, it was a class about how the white man was the source of all of America’s problems and how if you were a white male christian heterosexual person you were pretty much the devil.
The class was not one that I relished, and had I been able to take another class in its place, surely I would have. But I was forced to attend this waste of time. The teacher would make us right a one page summary of ‘what we read’ (implying I read her uber liberal textbook, which I didn’t, merely skimmed the topics and wrote whatever I pleased). Eventually, I began to use this as an opportunity to demolish her arguments, using sources both in the text and from elsewhere.
This came to a head when I wrote a three page, blistering, factually backed and well-cited page pointing out that this class was a waste of time backed not in science of any sort but politically correct progressivism that had no place in an institution of higher learning, which earned me a trip to her office where she threatened my academic career. In the office, I used my phone to invite the academic dean down to her office to engage in what I called a fact-finding mission, where I handed him a copy of the paper that she said she was going to fail me for writing.
In the end, she wasn’t asked to come back and teach the class a second time, and I still have my two degrees.
#Muricasoharditllmakeyoureyesbleed
I think a lot of these stories about vets or other conservatives being “harassed” by liberal professors or being graded low because of their political beliefs are either half-truths or greatly embellished. I went to one of the most liberal colleges in the West (CU Boulder, the Berkeley of the Rockies) and the only professor who regularly spouted political beliefs was the token conservative in the Poli Sci Dept (a fascinating guy by the name of Edward Rozek.) Now this was during the Clinton years (I was at CU from 98 – 2000) so some of the anti-conservative bias may have been muted for that reason, but nevertheless, I think many of the stories you hear are either overblown, or you are only hearing half of the story. For that matter, if an arrogant student presumes to “lecture” his professor with half-baked arguments he heard on talk radio, he probably deserves to get slapped down in class. I don’t care if you did 2 tours in the sandbox, you’re there to learn, so learn. I’m not saying that there isn’t bias in colleges, what I’m saying is that most college professors are professional enough to separate their personal beliefs from the job they have to educate and to teach people how to think critically. There were several times when I was in college that professors stated opinions as facts, or misrepresented things that I knew to be false, and in every case, I was able to challenge them and we had an open discussion of it. The discussion was respectful and my grades did not suffer a whit for it. In fact, I took a history class where the textbook we were using was quite biased about some issues, and when I brought it to the professor’s attention, she actually allowed me half a class period to talk to the class about why I disagreed with the text. I got an A in that class, as I did in most of my history classes. Now, if you sign up for “chip on the shoulder” classes (Black studies, Women’s studies, Native… Read more »
I’ve been wary of taking certain classes because of a phobia of leftist twisted professors. I took an American cultures class over the past summer taught by a professor who specialized in woman’s studies. As you can guess the class centered around how Whites screwed over Natives, Blacks and Women. I got an A, but I have to admit I mostly just bit my tongue and played along. I was able to get a few points across in class discussions because she wasn’t that close minded. In fact she was pretty receptive to certain things, but I wouldnt trust her to grade an opinion based paper,
While most of my college experience is back in the 80’s, I’ll also say that if you are majoring in a “hard” science, engineering, business, etc., most schools run a little more conservative than your average liberal arts enclave.
Liberalism? Ain’t nobody got time ‘fo dat!
I had some thing like that happen to me at Middle Tennessee State. I had a ultra left wing professor for a public speaking class A-Hole barely passed me with a C-. I really feel that I was black listed when I introduced my self as a Marine and a veteran of OIF. Hind sight being 20/20 I should have brought this to someone’s attention. The end result the credits from that class wouldn’t transfer.
#3 You’d be wrong. And, it doesn’t have to be vets. I had it happen to me three times, twice in undergraduate school for majoring in Chemistry and daring to take fine arts electives (Shakespeare and voice), and once in law school for writing a well-written exam. People in the sciences are also targeted by would-be dictators in the classroom, who think they have the right to give false grades based on whatever little turf wars they happen to be having. I think it has more to do with outperforming their lazy “top” students than any political point of view. I didn’t have a political point of view at the time. My teacher for Shakespeare made it absolutely clear that he would not tolerate having a Chemistry major in his class, even though I know I was one of the better writers. I did end up dropping the class, after taking an open-book exam that was graded “C”. I took that paper to the Registrar’s office to explain exactly why I was withdrawing. My voice teacher apologized profusely for giving me a “B” — she had been informed that only music majors could get “A” grades in music. The law school professor was a well-known campus character teaching “Religion and the Law” which turned out to be the only law school class where the students were rumored to be expected to mirror the professor’s political opinions. I knew him socially, and I put him to the test: I wrote a well-written exam, that concluded, reluctantly and with clear, detailed reasoning, against the positions I knew he wanted me to take. He gave me a “C.” I know that if I had only changed the last sentence of each essay, I would have had an “A.” However, I was in my last year, and I knew I could take the hit, if he failed my little test of character. I did cut him off socially, and I did say why. I never filed a lawsuit, but I did talk to the relevant deans. Life is too short to spend it on… Read more »
The only value to filing a lawsuit is the press it would receive for some portion of a day. What’s the tort? I dunno.
When I went back to school after the army, I had an English instructor who was gay, anti-war, anti-LEO and, a closet member of the Weathermen. My first exam, on the first essay question, I wrote “Fuck You”, handed it in and walked out of class, went down to admin and dropped the class. Ended up taking another history class, which was far more enjoyable, the instructor was a man who came to the U.S. as very young refugee from Eastern Europe at the end of WWII.
I guess the academics who fear leaving the walls of their classroom prisons are worse than they were when I was finishing my degree after my first hitch in the Navy. I had some requirements to fill; sociology, 1 semester; English, 1 semester; music, 1 semester; history, 1 semester. So I took criminology, English lit (Shakespeare), music theory, and world history. There was none of that monkeyass crap going on, but the university was more conservative and practical-minded then. I think it still is. They want graduates working, not settling in on campaus as perpetual residents.
Maybe being smack dab in the middle of Illinois cornfields has something to do with it, but the curriculum has ramped up to get people into the work world. That opinion-loaded, ‘agree or get a D’ crap doesn’t seem to exist. My sister teaches pre-med students there.
I think the only ‘idiot’ class I ever took was philosophy, which was a cartoon in itself.
The head of the languages department was my department head and resented the idea that I was not interested in becoming a schoolteacher. He was a Euro-trash drunken gay guy who put his Volkswagen through the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop on West Main Street one day. When he said you couldn’t do anything with foreign languages except be a schoolteacher, my response was “Well, thank God what I do for a living doesn’t depend on the limited opinion of a drunken clown like you.”
I think he was the only imbecile I ever ran into at that school. He didn’t last long.
Fall semester, 2002. About the second week of school, I was just out of the Army (might have even been on terminal leave still). I walked into my World Geography class and sat down, The professor was starting up the projector and put up a picture of George Bush in a clown suit. That picture told me everything I needed to know about the class – I wasn’t going to get anything out of it. I walked straight to my advisor’s office and explained why I was dropping the class. Every day we had to listen to the teacher give some anti-Bush/Republican/BS diatribe that had nothing to do with the class at all. I like to consider myself the kind of person who doesn’t get easily offended, but that was the last straw.
The reason why I post this is simple. Fast forward 11 years. What do you think would be the reaction if students walked into a classroom and a huge picture of Obama in a clown suit was displayed. There’d be mayhem and riots and dropped race cards everywhere.
I have experienced this. Both when I first got out in ’75, and once during the two and a half years ending last May as a pre-nursing student. It’s real, it happens, it sucks.
I thought I might experience something like this when I started school in January 2010 but, surprisingly, that hasn’t been the case even though I have had some pretty far left-leaning professors. All of mine have always encouraged differing thoughts and points of view
I think it depends on the school’s administration and the location. The University of Chicago is best known for its economics and physics departments. The U of I in Chicago is almost entirely a tech academy as is the Illinois Institute of Technology – all engineering. The College of Lake County was an ag school to start and now the curriculum is almost completely aimed at practicalities like accounting and computer programming. Northwestern University is as close as you can get to the ‘liberal’ end, but their curriculum is also mostly pragmatic and workplace-oriented.
I think it depends on where you are and what the administration is like.
@13: I have to wonder how much of this stuff is self inflicted, too. Walk into a college classroom with a chip on your shoulder looking for a fight and you’ll likely find one. Walk in there with an open mind and a willingness to learn and you may be surprised at how even professors who hold diametrically opposed beliefs can still engage in a productive and civil discussion of a controversial topic.
Professors expressing lefty opinions is one thing, but professors down-grading a student because the student dares to disagree with the professor’s radical views is quite another. My experience has been that most professors welcome – even encourage – differing opinions and those that don’t are often shunned even by their liberal colleagues.
martin…it could be. I really don’t have a wide point of view with which to compare with 2 years at a local community college and and now my 2nd year at a private school. The two extremes of the spectrum that I’ve had so far have both actually been poli-sci professors. One was very vocally conservative and the other was obvious, but less vocally, very liberal. Both were very professional and fair. My experience isn’t a good sample from which to generate statistics but it is my experience. Maybe I’ve been lucky
@15 I went to a liberal arts college that had an ROTC department. Once a week, the cadets had to wear their uniforms to class. I was in a Political Science class where, on the first day of the new semester that the cadets showed up in uniform, the professor looked at them for a long moment and said, “Don’t come to my class anymore in those uniforms. Oh — and you don’t get an excused absence for it, either.” (We had a three absence policy; gone more than three times unexcused and you failed the course.) It got ugly, and involved the ROTC command as well as the college president to straighten it out.
Certainly there are good professors out there. It’s the ones who act like this that cause trouble and misery for their students.
@3 and @15martinjmper-It’s always wise to maintain some healthy skepticism but those who have experienced academic bias and harassment find it frustrating for those who haven’t to disbelieve them. More than forty years ago, after six years in the 101st and 82d, with a tour in Nam involving ground combat operations as a rifle squad NCO and an S-3 staff sergeant, I decided to leave the Army and go back to college on the recently reinstated GI Bill. The first two years went well. I did encounter some occasional faculty hostility due to my service but that had no effect on my grades. The pony-tails were mostly still students in those days. I applied myself and was on the dean’s list every semester. Then I transferred to a larger school where my faculty adviser also happened to teach several courses in my major field. He was very receptive, praising my academic record and promptly put me in three of his classes. I told my wife there might be a problem because some of the good doctor’s mannerisms were a tad effeminate. Sure enough, he quickly began to pay too much attention to me in class and one day made his move in a private counseling session that he’d called. I set him clearly straight, politely but very firmly. And I most certainly had no chip on my shoulder. Guess what? From then on, nothing I did in class or on exams was satisfactory and at semester’s end he gave me two C’s and a D. For two years I’d made nothing lower than a B and very few of those. And that same semester I made A’s in my other classes under different professors. I went to the dean of students and laid it out for him. Remember that back in those days there was no such thing as a sexual harassment tort so I had no legal recourse. And since this jerk was tenured the dean informed me that he couldn’t touch him. I either had to continue on my current course and let this guy destroy my academic… Read more »
When I got out I attended a small college and the Physics teacher could not stop himself from dissing Pres. Reagan and going on and on about the Contra Rebels and Sandanistas. I finally couldn’t take it anymore, stood up and called him out on it. He sneeringly asked me why I thought I knew more about what was going on down there than he did and I told him maybe it was because instead of hiding out in a small town college a year or so ago I was actually on the ground there.
To his credit he never downgraded me that I’m aware of and I got the grade I deserved. This just shows that you never know.
I wish I could remember the professors name. She actually had a reputation for downgrading papers of people whom she didn’t agree with. I don’t know that it is systematic, but it does happen.
Only time I experienced anything remotely similar to this was in UMBC’s “Human Geography” class– the textbook had a map showing Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Jenin, Tulkarm, Ramallah and Nablus all marked as “Israeli settlements” (the last 4 have big red signs along their entrance roads stating that it is illegal and dangerous for Israeli citizens to travel beyond that point). I took the issue up with the instructor, and walked away from that conversation convinced that she had no idea what she was teaching.
Incidentally, that was also the only “Arts/Humanities” course I took where my final grade was above a “C”.
In school, as on the job, one can play along and reap the rewards or buck the system and reap the repercussions. We all recognize this truism. You give the scorer what he wants and then go about your business, silently or with a kindred spirit, calling the fool and foolishness just that. There have been times when I simply rode along in the boat and other times when I rocked it. In high school, I was a boat rocker, never realizing that the teacher didn’t give rat’s ass, that I was just another name in a long list of student names and that salary was unaffected by whether I lapped up what was being served or spat it out disgustedly. My college experience was different. I employed the sound advice of not letting my schooling interfere with my education.