I think that there might be a valid case that academia is biased
against conservative views and perhaps particularly against conservative
Christianity (though I have a harder time swallowing the notion that it is
biased against Christianity in general).
But even if that is so, I don't think that constitutes a problem to
be fixed. It's not as though the rest of the world is unbiased. And it's not
as though academics have any special power to force their ideas onto the
rest of the world. We certainly have far less such power than do political
leaders, business leaders, the media, or even many religious leaders. Even
when our bias leads us to be wrong (for example, in my opinion, with some of
the more extreme academic opposition to the current U.S. military actions),
without the balance we provide to the conservative bias of most of the rest
of society I think we'd have a much bigger problem. For example, does anyone
serious doubt that we as a nation would vote away some of the basic rights
of various minorities if given the chance? Academia provides a check against
that kind of thing.
I worry sometimes that if only liberals worry about their biases, we
wind up with nothing but the conservative perspective. Academia doesn't seem
to be close to that fate right now, but look at what has happened in the
media. At the same time that we saw the rise of the unabashedly biased
right-wing media voice, the mainstream media reacted to persistent
accusations of liberal bias by bending over backwards to appear unbiased.
We're left with essentially no media "watchdog" against the excesses of the
right, and a glut of such watchdogs against the excesses of the left (e.g.,
once again, those committed by academia).
This strikes me as similar to the notion that we should provide
"balance" by requiring science classes to teach both evolution and
creationism. I notice that conservative columnist William Safire recently
made an argument similar to the one I'm making when the Voice of America
decided (wrongly, in my opinion and in his) to broadcast a pro-Taliban
interview to "balance" their anti-Taliban broadcasts, despite the fact that
they were broadcasting to a region that is otherwise entirely pro-Taliban.
It's as though the Packers were playing the Bears, and the Packers players
decided that to be fair, half of them would try to keep the Packers from
scoring. That kind of "fairness" is not a desirable goal.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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