Should the public subsidize Left-wing curriculum at colleges

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Since when is the left "totalitarian?"


Pretty much any major institution? At least any of the ones I've been associated with.


Where was this? And what POS university offers classes on Excel?


The closest to this I've ever seen was a history prof who included information about women in the reading lists. It didn't take up class time and didn't show up on exams, but the book was on the syllabus. Otherwise, even if a student expressed a left-leaning opinion in class discussions most professors would look vaguely uncomfortable and change the topic.


Math and science instruction aren't politicized at all. History generally isn't from what I've seen. Maybe you went to a crappy school, or maybe you're delusional and/or fabricating persecution to complain about.

Good to see you back Orwell, I took a short break from here because some of the posters were getting beyond ridiculous. BTW I have decided that whilst I admire and wish for Marxian economics and democracy, it can never happen, people are simply to self centred and no amount of culture change will sufficiently remedy this. Maybe your idea of a benevolent dictator is not so bad for a short term fix.

@ the OP if you are going to post on politics please study it, I am sick and tired of pointing out that left wing politics by definition CANNOT be totalitarian. Unless that is you perceive a majority setting the rules to be totalitarian, funny though because I thought that was democracy.

As to your list, like Orwell said many of them are simple facts, and the rest is banal stereotyping, bordering on the infantile.

Do any of the University of California schools do that? The University of Oregon? The University of Washington? Where is this bastion of non-politicized schooling you're associated with, and how, as a Leftist, do you know when the things instructors say aren't left-leaning bias, when most leftists tend not only to confuse their subjective views with objective reality, but agree with the positions noted in the OP as a matter of proven fact, that they just happen to be affirming?

I've been at Portland State, the University of Washington, an Art Institute, a Fashion Merchandising school, City College of San Francisco, UC-SF, and quite a number of community colleges in California, Oregon, and Washington. I know I live on the Left-coast, but things aren't any different by the accounts of my friends attending the University of Texas, The American University, or any Public or Private Ivy.

By the way I had to take the excel course at my fashion merchandising school because my major was merchandise marketing / product development where you had to do retail buying and know merchandise math and not all the girls at my school knew their way around excel.

You're lucky if that's only been your experience. My writing 122 teacher spent a lot of time trying to out me as a conservative lol.

Maybe you should try an experiment:
Voice conservative viewpoints in class, not with a smirk or a mocking demeanor, but with conviction, articulating these ideas as maturely as they are voiced by the smartest conservatives, and see how that goes over the course of four years.

Because we're all dying to know where this non-politicized college you speak of exists. Auburn, Texas A&M, Hillsdale, schools that are either openly conservative or have a large conservative student body don't count because they don't constitute the majority anywhere outside the South East, or private schools here and there. But the overwhelming majority of state schools with the overwhelming majority of student bodies house leftwing doctrine, that if you want to get your degree or get good grades, have to abide by.

Most kids don't spend a majority of their time taking math or history classes. Liberal Arts and social science or humanities majors certainly don't, and there's the majority of your student body.

Well point them out. Otherwise they aren't banal stereotyping or bordering on the infantile.

No I'm well aware of the notion that "Nothing Evil or Bad or Mean can come of our good, well-intentioned Leftwing ideas."

That's the language of faith speaking though, the inability to entertain anything that may lead one to doubt one's beliefs. And I don't think that's a healthy approach to reality... to make yourself reality blind to the consequences of your ideas unless they result in a good outcome. This is no different then Muslims who say that fellow members of their group who engage in terrorism aren't Muslim because Islam would never lead a person to do those things, or Christians who deny antisemitism in Europe during medieval times, because a true believer in Christ would not have used every Easter as an excuse to massacre Jewish communities.

When was Japan going to land invade us....last I remember we land invaded them, then targeted 'civilians' and killed thousands of them just to win a war. IDK if it won the war, targeting civilians is terrorism none the less, so I see nothing wrong with re-visiting that event and criticizing what happened it was f***d up by definition. Also as I said I did not notice any specifical left wing curriculum in college...I specifically studied psychology, sociology and history which would be the main courses to have a liberal bias and sure some professors had that kind of leaning, some did not. I certainly did not notice any terrible liberal conspiracy going on that is for sure. And well its not the fault of liberals you feel certain facts are left wing bais when its just a fairly well known fact.

Also do explain what would be so much better and more accurate with a right wing bais? So you feel college/higher education has a liberal/left wing bias....would a conservative bias be better? If you say yes in what ways would the conservative bias be better?

Those fascists weren't going to land-invade us. They started a bloody war that massacred millions of Asians and raped almost as many. You're granting a victim status that you probably would never afford the Nazis. The only way to beat them and make sure they never start another such war was to defeat them. Not to beat them back to their Island and leave them be but to get peace on our terms, which included demilitarization and an end to their empire-building campaign. The british bombed mostly German civilians, but those dead civilians were the fault of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, not the allied powers fighting him. The responsibility for the death of each and every single Japanese lies with the Emperor and his military generals. The small numbered killed by those atomic bombs, as horrific as their deaths were, saved us hundreds of thousands of men, and saved Japan millions of civilians. Sometimes in life, your options aren't between a good moral choice and an evil choice, but rather one evil choice, and a far greater evil, and as adults, have to choose between the two. If we didn't take care of Japan, the carnage they would have continued to spread across Asia would also be our fault, because we had the chance to stop them and didn't.

Maybe you didn't notice the bias because you happen to either agree with most of those opinions or find them to be incontrovertible uncontested fact. You know most people on the Left polled by Pew(I think) said the mainstream media was pretty non-biased, and felt that when the media was being biased, was doing so on behalf of corporations or doing the bidding of the radical right. But most conservatives polled said that the media is biased. So I think this is just a case of where you happen to agree with opinions put out by the media or voiced in academia, and therefore don't feel that there's any bias involved.

Well, ideally, in a place where "ideas" should be exchanged freely, all viewpoints should be entertained without punishment. A conservative bias that reflected the many taxpayers who subsidize public education would be fair, not to mention provide an alternative narrative to the one the Left is offering. What this would do is allow ideas to compete against each other, and let the best ideas win. Leftist Progressive values, especially on the fronts of race and gender, have grown so immature and toxic because they have no competing alternatives to keep them honest. They can say whatever they want and get away with it, and no one will challenge them, or even have the permission to challenge them(without consequences), because only those kind of ideas can be heard.

left versus right- in the end, whose ox gets gored?

A major public research university, at the moment. Previously a mid-sized private university.


Because of basic self-awareness? It is measurably true that law enforcement in America operates with an anti-Black bias; it would also obviously be a political statement for a professor to say so in class.


Conservatives tend to do this much more than liberals. Most research shows that liberals are more comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction than conservatives; this lends itself to better self-awareness in understanding that other people do disagree with them. I have met a number of conservatives who are genuinely baffled at the notion of anyone disagreeing with them on anything.


Well, some of them are. When it comes to scientific topics like climate change, evolution, vaccines, and GMOs (there you go, two topics on which conservatives are idiots, and two on which liberals are idiots; enjoy the balance) there is ample scientific evidence to regard the basic statements as settled fact: vaccines and GMOs are safe, evolution and climate change are not elaborate frauds.


That's an awful lot of jumping around. Did you just flunk out of all these places? You seem to believe you've been persecuted because of your political beliefs, and yet I know plenty of right-wing students who got their degrees.


Yeah. No worthwhile educational institute will waste time teaching Excel, especially in a full class.


Two issues:
a) In no topic I would likely teach would it be reasonably to make any sort of political comment. I would get just as much, if not more, trouble for promoting liberal ideas as conservative, because bringing up a political discussion would obviously be a forced departure from the course material.
b) You say "as voiced by the smartest conservatives." Where are these smart conservatives? I say this non-sarcastically; I have been on a 5+ year search to find a right wing news outlet that wasn't outright f*****g delusional on the reporting of basic facts. It is plenty possible to articulate conservative beliefs on states' rights, tax policy, healthcare reform, or a thousand other topics, but I have been utterly unable, despite years of searching, to find a conservative who does so consistently without diving into delusional crazy land.


Google the name Salaita. Professor got a job offer revoked for making anti-Israel comments.


Since when is history not part of the humanities?

Oh hey, there's an old name I recognize. Maybe, but that is dependent on consistently finding a good dictator.


What? Of course it can. There have been totalitarian left wing regimes in the past. Even if democratic institutions remain in place, it's entirely possible for a culture to be perverse enough that the populace backs totalitarian policies. Imagine, for example, if we let the American South have true local democracy. How do you expect they would treat women and minorities? How has democracy worked out in the Middle East, where free and fair elections put militant Islamists in power?

If the populace backs a particular ideology by fundamentally democratic means then surely that is the antithesis of totalitarianism. Perhaps I am guilty of "no true Scotsman" but to my mind a regime that is totalitarian in nature cannot be socialist, sure they may call themselves socialist but that means nothing. Prime example being North Korea. Its a bit like right wing, war mongering, bigotted, folk calling themselves Christian, now they may know scripture, and they may worship JC but by their actions they are christian in name only.

How does law enforcement operate with an anti-black bias considering how much crime blacks engage in against fellow blacks, as well as other non-whites?



Yeah but how do you account for all the liberals that think America is a racist country, who think that everyone who opposes same-sex marriage is a hateful bigot, who believe in zero population growth, who believe that there is a rape culture on college campuses, who think that there is a war by men against women to keep them down, that the rich got rich by stealing money from the poor, who view Israel as the great villain in the world outside of America? They don't constitute the majority? The majority of liberals don't hold the majority of those points?

Liberals wouldn't hold those convictions so strongly if they entertained ideas and views that ran counter to their own thinking. You can only hold all of those views simultaneously, by insulating yourself from differing points of views, and by only entertaining caricatures and strawmen articulations of conservative views.




I don't know if global warming is proven fact, and the climate changes. And evolution doesn't warrant the attention we give it since most of the body of currently known science doesn't depend on it or is predicated on the theory. Science would survive without it. It's mostly irrelevant and opposing it doesn't make you anti-science. And in any event, while I don't know the science behind climate change fully, I acknowledge that. Most people who support global warming know nothing of the science behind what they're supporting, and brandy about the fact that science supports their view on the issue, while not caring what science has to say about nuclear power or GMO's or vaccines, which can only mean that most of them only care about science when science advances their politics, and happily prostitute science to achieve their social ends, and throw it away when it becomes an impediment.

The leftwing opposition to vaccines and gmo's is more frightening, and I'm not even a fan of GMO's or vaccines myself. But the Right doesn't fear-monger to the point of painting those that differ with them on evolution and climate change, as inherently bad narcissists who don't want clean air or drinking water for their children, who are morally defunct, and nothing more then just greedy corporate stooges/sellouts acting out of bad intentions and self-interest. Have you seen the anti-nuclear power crowd or the GMO folks and how they slander those who disagree with them? We're bad people, yet those of us who don't agree with you on evolution or climate change merely think you're wrong or mistaken.



I started college going to community colleges around Portland with the intention to transfer to Portland State after i figured out what I wanted to do. I took a few classes at both institutions before something caught my eye at the Art Institute of Portland. Fashion looked like an interesting major, but as I went along I kind of realized I was far more interested in the planning and marketing end of fashion then in sewing garments so I transferred to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco, where I got my degree. I attended UCSF and the City college of SF to pick up cheaper credits and make my schooling go by faster(plus the College Republicans were putting up a good fight that I wanted to be a part of), plus it gave me online classes so I didn't have to be at school as often. I also attended the University of Washington to learn Hebrew recently and took a few of their Jewish Studies courses. I wasn't persecuted at most of these places because I never made my views known after I made that mistake early on in community college and Portland State. It was much easier to play the part of a commie, and when I wanted to test a few ideas out, I'd do so innocently and delicately, not ascribing any of my ideas as positions I actually held. I instead sat back and just enjoyed the conservative bashing. It's better not to struggle against the intolerant Left when you have nothing to gain, and besides, it allows you the chance to know them intimately and how they view the world.

I got my degree, and any conservative can if you fake it till you make it.



Ours was packed, it was a major-requirement unless you already knew your way around excel. And the girls there hated it but it made retail math, somewhere where most of us creatives and design majors thought we were safe from math, a lot easier. Plus I was mistaken, it wasn’t just Excel, it was also Word and Powerpoint, but excel was the focus for merchandise math.




I was shot down for doubting high speed rail in a human geography class. I delicately tiptoed around the fact that maybe Muslims were at least partially responsible for their suffering, or that maybe America wasn't responsible for poverty around the world and my professor spent half the term trying to out me no matter how liberal I pretended to be. Most non-major requirements have course content tailored almost entirely towards social justice. My Business Ethics spent the first 3 weeks skimping through philosophy theory, and the rest of the time perverting Kant or abusing our time talking about the morality of collectivizing society, our unfair wage system, and the last class was about race and policing. My Intro to Religions class was entirely about how great Eastern Religions were, how we would be nowhere today without the contributions of Islam, and then the Christian portion at the end was mostly on the crusades and the inquisition. In other words, between the founding of the movement to the present day, that’s all that happened in Christian history. After a while, it just became a blast for me, to out-articulate Leftist viewpoints because of how well I knew them. That’s certainly what I spent the rest of my time doing after my first year of college.

The smartest conservatives are mostly Jews, so that should shorten your search.

Dennis Prager, Robert Kagan, David Brooks, David Berlinski, Robert Murray, Jonah Goldberg, Yuval Levin, Heather Macdonald, Bret Stephens, Joel Kotkin, Caroline Glick, to name a few. You can find a large number of them here: https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/

Conservatives will always dive into delusional crazyland so long as anything they say that goes counter to your beliefs is delusional, and crazy. Maybe it isn’t a “them” problem.



Well that's nice for a change. The obsession with Israel in academia can only come down to bigotry. There's no basis for the preoccupation with the Palestinians and the hatred expressed against the Jewish state.



I guess.

Huh, my experience has been the exact opposite, which may be a function of where I live, but I often encounter it online too, many times right here on WP. It usually goes hand in hand with a startling inability to imagine someone approaching the same set of problems and arriving at different solutions with equally noble intentions, regardless of the likely success of said solutions, instead reading everything as bad faith. Liberals buying the black/poor vote with welfare money or conservatives wanting to cut welfare because they hate the poor rather than because they believe self sufficiency is the better way to help are both good examples of this style of thinking, though the later is much more common here.


Sounds like my search for the well informed gun controller, equally fruitless. Are you talking social conservatives here, or any old kind? I mean, SoCons really are the bottom of the barrel, but economic conservatives are pretty rational in general. According to Haidt, they're the most likely to pass ideological Turing tests, an impressive feat of reasoning, and something liberals fail spectacularly at, more so the more liberal they are.



That seems like a bit of a red herring, considering the vast sea of leftwing activism that regularly bursts forth from academia, a lone firing for anti-Israel activism is more of an aberration than indicative of anything. I mean, have you really missed the whole social justice movement that's been brewing on campuses for some years now that's recently spilled into the mainstream? Or all the other similarly lockstep liberal movements that have proceeded it? Where is the conservative equivalent? I think you know full well that academia is attractive to a particular subset of people, and not the kind who grew up hunting and farming, and that biases don't have to be blatantly stated in order to have substantial effects, similar to what goes on with the media. It's not a conspiracy or anything, it's just demographics, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.

WOW what a load of spurious assumption laden drivel. Here's a link that might help you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

no u