The bias is there for anyone to see. It’s nice to hear this confirmation from people who work in the field.
From Scholars for Peace in the Middle East:
Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s BiasLike most of our academic colleagues, we aren’t supporters of Donald Trump. But we have to admit he has our profession’s number on a critical point—and we’ve conducted a study that proves it. College teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme, and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.Our new study, conducted with Stephanie Muravchik, draws on the Open Syllabus Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of more than 27 million syllabi scraped from the web. We use it to see how contentious subjects like racial bias in the criminal justice system and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught, with an eye to whether professors expose students to the broad scholarly controversy around these issues. We found they usually don’t.Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi, as it should given its scholarly and public influence. In the U.S. it is assigned more often than “Hamlet” and nearly as often as John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.”Ms. Alexander argues that America’s war on drugs is akin to Jim Crow—a system designed to control and subjugate black Americans. Her work invites scholarly controversy, drawing criticism from historians and social scientists. Among them is James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017). While Mr. Forman is no fan of mass incarceration, he doesn’t think it’s the product of a racist conspiracy. He notes that tough-on-crime policies have enjoyed the support of black leaders trying to halt soaring crime rates in their cities.In courses that teach Ms. Alexander’s book, Mr. Forman’s book is paired with it less than 4% of the time. Works by other prominent critics of “The New Jim Crow”—including political scientist Michael Fortner of Claremont McKenna, law professor John Pfaff of Fordham and sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton—are assigned with Ms. Alexander even less often.Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault. Ms. Davis, a two-time vice-presidential nominee of the Communist Party USA, has said that “the only true path of liberation for black people is the one that leads toward a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this country.” In his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” Mr. Coates wrote that “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Even Ms. Alexander, reviewing his book for the New York Times, said she was “disappointed” that it offered “little hope . . . that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America.” Foucault (1926-84), a French theorist, reduced all Western societies to intricate and oppressive systems of social control.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY