Public higher-education administrators in Pennsylvania recently testified before state legislators that in recent years there have been very few formal grievance complaints from students about leftwing political classroom bias.
In partial response to this latest “no bias” incantation from the higher-education status quo, I suggest that:
- To limit the review of bias to filed student grievances is, in and of itself, an exercise in deflecting from a thorough review. Any serious review must take into account the abundance of evidence of bias in institutional vision statements, course descriptions and syllabi, selection of speakers and awards recipients, surveys and studies, documented case studies, etc.
- Regarding even this artificially limited review, however, campus establishments often put up roadblocks to filing and expeditiously vetting such grievance cases, thus ensuring there will be no or few cases filed. Specifically:
- More cases are not filed because students, for example, in freshmen orientation, are not encouraged to know their rights regarding viewpoint discrimination (in contradistinction to the effort made to “sensitize” them in race and gender discrimination). For instance, students generally are not made aware of how to file, and the need to document, grievances involving political bias.
- Dissident (i.e., non-left-leaning) students, fearful for their grades, and of not obtaining letters of recommendation, are intimidated into not coming forward with complaints.
- Complaints easily get “buried,” that is, they are not expeditiously conveyed from professor to department head, provost, or university counsel. The process is thus dragged out, so that in many cases students “give up” or graduate before the complaint is resolved.
These assertions of “no bias” are, in short, disingenuous. In the face of them, campus presidents and boards have been known to wash their hands of the problem by not inquiring about filed cases or other evidence of bias, or by pronouncing they “don’t get down to this level of detail.”
Pennsylvania and other state lawmakers must broaden their inquiries into campus bias to include all evidence and consider that students’ (and for that matter, faculty members’) grievances are not always dealt with in good faith.