Teaching inside the bubble: Students hear one side of controversial issues

Professors say they're not indoctrinating students, write Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik, Claremont Colleges professors. But it's become the "academic norm" to teach one side of controversial issues.

They used a database of millions of college syllabi to study how professors teach about racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Are they "teaching the controversy?" Usually not, the Claremont professors conclude.

The most assigned reading on race and criminal justice is Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, which argues that mass incarceration "emerged as a way to reestablish the subjugation of black Americans."

Yale Law Professor James Forman, Jr. challenged Alexander's thesis, writing that it “fails to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment, ignores violent crimes while focusing almost exclusively on drug crimes, obscures class distinctions within the African American community, and overlooks the effects of mass incarceration on other racial groups.” His book, Locking Up Our Own, won the Pulitzer Prize. It's assigned with Alexander's less than four percent of the time, they write. Other critics are even less likely to be on the syllabi.

Instead, students are most likely to be assigned Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

Shields, Avnur and Muravchik "estimate that less than 10 percent of professors assigning Alexander’s book actually teach the controversy surrounding it."

Classes on Israel and Palestine typically feature texts "that question the moral legitimacy of the Israeli state," they write. Books defending Israel are rarely on the syllabi.

Edward Said’s classic Orientalism "is among the most popular books assigned in the United States, showing up in nearly four thousand courses," they write. It is rarely paired "with any of the critics he sparred with, like Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, or Samuel Huntington. Instead, it’s most often taught with books by fellow luminaries of the postmodern left, such as Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault."

Classes on the ethics of abortion are not as unbalanced, they write. "More than a third of syllabi that assign Judith Jarvis Thomson’s classic defense of abortion rights, for example, pair it with a pro-life voice." But two-thirds do not.

Some professors may be unaware of the scholarly controversies, they write. About "a quarter of professors who teach The New Jim Crow, for example, are trained in the fields of English, social work, education, theology, and philosophy — and thus they presumably have no real expertise in law or political science."

Since posting their paper, Shields, Avnur and Muravchik have been told that "now is not the time to be raising these concerns," they write. "In the face of Trump’s blunderbuss war on the universities, we shouldn’t air our profession’s dirty laundry."

"Colleges and universities are the bedrock of American democracy and the engine of social mobility, innovation, and progress," states Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Critics are fascists.

In AAUP's magazine, Academe, Lisa Siraganian, a Johns Hopkins humanities professor, offers Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity. It's just a "quota system" for conservatives. Viewpoint diversity is a MAGA plot, she writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Her argument against intellectual pluralism is "an unintentional masterclass in how to lose the moral high ground," write FIRE's Greg Lukianoff, Samuel J. Abrams and Adam Goldstein in a thesis-by-thesis rebuttal. I'll cut to their conclusion: Academia's defenders need to admit the truth: “We have a homogeneity problem that makes error invisible and dissent costly.”

The next step:

End compelled statements and ideological screens. Adopt institutional neutrality and robust free-expression commitments. Protect due process. Build recurring, in-house debates across real schools of thought.

Academics who can't do that "aren't serious," write Lukianoff, Abrams and Goldstein. "You're just ideological bullies looking for protection against a much bigger, scarier ideological bully."

They warn: "This is how Trump wins — not because his administration understands or cares about free speech and academic freedom, but because the people who should have been steadfastly defending those principles decided they were optional."

Universities must reform themselves "or have it done to them."