The evidence is in. We liberal professors are doing a bad job at indoctrination — it’s not our hard work that is persuading students, we’re just coasting on a general trend that education liberalizes.
We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.
Damn. Are the Democrats going to cut my Professional Indoctrinator stipend now? I’ve been saying for years that I don’t teach political perspectives in my classes, but nobody believed me, and they kept passing those big checks to me.
Problem for parents who indoctrinate their kids is that an open education is the opposite of indoctrination.
Too many parents think of their kids as extensions of themselves and not as people.
People need to understand that reality has a well-known liberal bias. If you go to college and learn true facts and critical thinking skills, you’ll be indoctrinated by reality. And there you are.
At a university I had a conservative goon who was supposed to be “teaching” thermodynamics. He would start every SINGLE CLASS by claiming that anyone who was against the Vietnam War was either a communist or else they had been duped by the communists. A WORST CLASS EVER, what an incurable belligerent jackass. Fortunately I found an excellent thermodynamics instructor for the remaining quarters. As Stephen Colbert has publicly stated, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Supporting truth and reality has become a political position.