Are colleges and universities biased?

I'm sure you've all heard about the brouhaha over Obama speaking at Notre Dame University's commencement. Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame President, said that inviting Obama to speak was not a political statement or endorsement of policy. But he didn't stop there. He said he admired the President's views on "expanding health care, alleviating poverty, and building peace through diplomacy." Sounds pretty political to me. Sounds pretty left-leaning political to me.

But that's not a surprise. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture conducted a study covering ten years. They categorized commencement speakers for the nation's top schools as either liberal, conservative, republican, democrat, or non-partisan. The numbers added up to 226 liberal speakers and 15 conservative ones.

Yet faculty from those schools will tell you they are very open-minded -- it's all us conservatives who have closed, narrow minds. American Enterprise magazine did a survey on how lop-sided faculty representation is: "In eight academic departments surveyed at Cornell University, 166 professors were registered in the Democratic Party or another party of the left, with just six registered with Republicans or another party of the right. . .Similar imbalance showed up in departments at the 19 other universities surveyed. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, the numbers were 116 to 5. It was 151-17 at Stanford, 54-3 at Brown, 99-6 at the University of California-San Diego, and 59-7 at Berkeley, the flagship of the University of California system . . . At Williams College, a poll turned up only four registered Republicans among the more than 200 professors on campus."

But do the lefties promote their idealogies in the classroom? You bet they do! University of Southern California San Diego Provost David Jordan said, "Why should I teach a point of view I don't agree with? I should teach what is useful to the student. I don't know that I have the responsibility to teach somebody's view that is benighted or irrelevant." He not only promotes his view, he dismisses anyone with an opposing view as "benighted and irrelevant." Sounds very open-minded to me!

Star Parker, conservative commentator and author, was invited by Students for Human Life to speak at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. University staff rejected the request for her to speak on campus. But they approved invitations to nut-case liberal Al Franken and transgender activist Debra Davis. Very open-minded, wouldn't you say? And this is a Catholic school!

Again, I say, we're in deep doo-doo!

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34388
"Notre Dame dishes up moral ambiguity." The Dallas Morning News; May 19, 2009; p. 15A.