Educated Does Not Mean Liberal!

So I was watching that Pen and Teller show Bullshit the other night and I saw something on there that has always gotten on my nerves. Don't get me wrong--this is a great show, but they did this whole "College is Bullshit" segment and within that segment, they talk about how colleges are now stamping out freedom of speech for anyone who is not a minority and or a conservative Republican. They had this guy from FIRE.ORG (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), whose name I believe was Alan Charles Kors talking about how colleges today are bastions of liberal, democratic and socialist brainwashing. For those of you who don't know, FIRE is not a group that is concerned with every student’s free speech on campus. They are only concerned for the speech of people whom they agree with, namely conservatives, Republicans and Christians. This is not a group who will defend a student artist who creates nude or controversial art or the rights of a Palestinian student union to show films depicting the suffering of the Palestinian people under occupied rule. This is also not a group that will fight for the rights of war protesters on college campuses. So their name is somewhat misleading, as with all these other "family" and faux free speech and equal rights (for Christians and gun owners) type groups because the title doesn't live up to their intentions. That is probably what the show should have been about; after all, it is called Bullshit.

Anyhow, on this Bullshit episode Alan Kors cited the study of 1000 university professors in the U.S. and found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 7-1 in the Humanities and Social Science departments and 30-1 in the Anthropology and Sociology departments. At U of C Berkeley and Stanford he found a 9-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans within the faculty and administration. They also claim that the University of California system and Harvard topped U.S. universities in per capita political contributions to Democratic candidates and that within those two systems, Kerry voters outnumbered Bush voters 19-1. On the FIRE site, they talk about a study conducted in 2000 that stated among the voter registration records of Humanities and Social Science instructors at Cornell University, Democrats outnumbered 166-6 and 151-17 at Stanford. In the Ivy League system, they found that 80% of the professors voted for Gore in 2000 and only 9% voted for Bush. They claim that this is bad and that religious, conservative, Republican and uneducated people need to be represented as well. What they don’t report on is the discrepancy between conservative vs. liberal staff at a place like Liberty University, David Lipscomb, Bob Jones or Regent University. Sure, those aren’t state schools but neither are Harvard or Stanford and they are a lot cheaper than Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley, so why can’t these conservative students go there if they want to learn about how the dinosaurs never existed?

Of the Universities mentioned with these terribly biased teaching staffs, I would like to point out the following: US News and World Report publishes an annual ranking of the nation's top schools; for 2006, Harvard was ranked number 1, Stanford number 5, and U of C Berkeley ranked 20th in the nation. Clearly, one of the main reasons these schools are ranked so high is because of their qualified and educated faculty. They wouldn’t be ranked this high if they were hiring half-retarded, bible-thumping, gun rack-owning, high school dropouts would they? What this says to me is that when you become educated you leave behind fantasy, myth and dogma and you appear to become what is considered “liberal”. You start to challenge traditions and begin questioning the world from an outside viewpoint and start questioning what you were taught by your parents and Sunday School teachers. Don’t mistake a guy who can analyze strata layers to determine how old they are as liberal if he concludes that the earth has been here for close to 5 billion years with no evidence of human fossils for the first 4 or so billion years. He doesn’t have an agenda, he has data. He has evidence that may or may not go against what you believe. Just because you don't believe that an invisible man created the entire Universe in 6 days doesn't mean you are a liberal socialist, it means you have evidence to the contrary and you know better. Bottom line: don’t confuse educated with liberal if you are not educated enough to know the difference.

Why is higher education the only place Republicans care about the ratio of Democrats to Republicans? At least in an educational setting there are facts that are discussed and independent books to read that weren’t written by these liberal professors. How can something like geography, history, or numbers and math be either liberal or conservative? Teaching kids that Europeans (us) wiped out the Native Americans and owned slaves is not liberal, they are historical facts. What they should be worried about is how the Republicans in Congress out number the Democrats and that 78% of all oil company donations go towards Republican candidates. A Democrat teaching kids about art history or Sigmund Freud is far less damaging than the oil industry running the White House and deciding which countries we invade.

I would also like to point out that if Harvard, the rest of the Ivy league and all these other “liberal” brainwashing institutions are trying to convert our students into liberal socialists they are doing a terrible job. George Bush went to both Yale and Harvard and most of his cabinet has attended other Ivy League schools. These are not people I generally think of when I hear the terms liberal or socialist. The President, Vice President and Secretary of State all having oil ties that affect our foreign policy is an easier connection to make than professors that happen to have voted for Gore, are all brainwashing our youth into becoming tree hugging, Christ hating socialists.