Adequately Preparing Students?
NYT in an article about Alito had the following snippet:
"Professor Shuck said, "The politics of Yale Law School and the other elite law schools is 95 percent left and 5 percent other." He said he counted perhaps four conservative professors on a faculty of about 70."
I've noticed that at most universities, the vast majority of the professors are liberal to far-left. A professor I have at MIT once told a student in class, "The greatest respect you can afford me is to disagree." I've also heard a prof say to a class, after the 2004 election, "They're evil. We've got to change our Democratic party."
Especially at law school, the value of diverse view points is central. Students may like being in an environment where they can chortle about W's idiocy and crap on conservatives, but such an environment does them a disservice. You cannot win debates with people that aren't there. I had a fifth-year senior student at MIT who, after reading the libertarian thinker Robert Nozick, said, "I love Nozick. This is the guy against whom I've wanted to debate for years."
Sadly, though, undergrads are usually taught only one side of issues and, strangely, the debates are focused on at the grad level.
I'm not against liberals, but the university should be a bit more of an objective place. At U.Mich's polisci dept. all but one professor described themselves as "liberal," the last guy was a "moderate." MIT's polisci dept. is considered relatively conservative, but no professors in it supported the Iraq War. Without a diversity of opinions, the learning environment stagnates and the much touted term "diversity" becomes an empty word implying the tokenization of the races rather than the incorporation of a menagerie of viewpoints.
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