Over the past few years, organizations like the American Council of Trustees (ACTA) and Alumni, David Horowtiz’s “Students for Academic Freedom” and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) have attempted to convince legislators, the media and the general public that there is a crisis of political bias in higher education. Based on those claims, they’ve attacked individual faculty members and universities and have attempted to pass legislative restrictions on what faculty can teach and students can learn. Yet, none of these organizations have produced any evidence that there’s a problem to address. The Manhattan Institute’s latest study is a perfect example.
Much like
last year’s “googling
diversity” report from NAS (that report claimed that there was a problem with
higher education because when you googled the word “diversity” on higher
education websites, it appeared more often than when you googled the word “diversity”
on business websites), this report lends no insight into higher education.
The new
Manhattan Institute study—reported in their “City Journal”—searches and counts
the number of times the words “multiculturalism” or “diversity” appear in
education school course titles versus the word “math.” Upon finding that math appears fewer times, the
study concludes that the priorities and content of education programs are
unbalanced and aren’t teaching what’s necessary.
There are
obviously more problems with this methodology than we have time to go into
here. Course titles rarely tell you much
about the actual content of the course, most education programs now require
pre-requisite courses outside the school, many teachers in high school don’t
actually teach math, etc. Really, all
this and the NAS study from last year seem to prove is how desperate opponents of
a free exchange of ideas are to show there’s a problem.
Imagine if
all these organizations instead focused on real problems students face in
higher education.