A regular reader writes:
First, I've been enjoying your blog greatly since you disabled comments. Thank you for daring to do that. (I say dare because nowadays comments are all the rage, and are used as traffic boosters - usually to the detriment of a site.)
I knew my traffic would take a nose dive were I to disallow comments, but I don't blog for mere traffic. Back in January and February, when I was discussing the ideas of Ayn Rand with comments allowed, there were days when my page view count was up around 2000. Right now I am averaging about 670 page views per day. The high numbers in January and February were in part due to the subject matter: Rand's ideas fascinate adolescents of all ages. But the quality of comments was so bad that it gave me yet another reason to shut them off.
Second, a question. I know you're a philosophy professor who openly identifies as conservative. Is it your experience that universities are typically liberal-biased? As in, they intend to promote liberal views, indoctrinate students into liberal ideas, etc.
That is indeed my experience, but, quite apart from my experience, it is a fact that cannot be denied. Conservatives are in the minority especially in the humanities and social sciences. For example, in the 2004 election, one survey showed that 87.6% of the social sciences professors queried voted for Kerry, while only 6.2% voted for Bush. In the humanities, the numbers were 83.7% for Kerry and 15% for Bush.
Third - assuming your answer to the previous is yes, even a qualified yes - do you think there is any moral difficulty with sending a child, particularly one who isn't intellectually prepared to defend him/herself from such indoctrination, to a university?
Curious of your views as a (seemingly rare) conservative philosopher.
Two quick points. First, not all colleges and universities exhibit the same degree of liberal bias, and of course there are a few schools with the opposite bias. So whether there is a moral problem or not will depend on where you send your child. Second, much depends on the subject in which the student intends to major. There is little or no liberal bias in the schools of business, engineering, and medicine. Mathematics, computer science, physics and chemistry are also not amenable to ideological deformation. (Of course, this won't prevent a liberal professor of these subjects from airing his political and social views in the classroom.) But with the life sciences ideology begins to find a foothold. (Would a Dawkins-type biology professor be able to keep his mouth shut about religion or be objective about global warming or race and IQ questions?) When we get to the social sciences and humanities, however, we enter leftist-occupied territory.
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