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Volume CXXXIII, Number 11 |
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Moving towards balance
News that Democrats outnumber Republicans among Bowdoin faculty members by a ratio of 23 to 1 is certainly not a surprise, but its predictability does not lessen its potentially disconcerting implications. Affiliation with a given political party is, in most cases, indicative of ideology, and the Democrat vs. Republican divide shadows the other, more significant division among faculty members: liberal vs. conservative.
Many conservatives have long complained that academia is dominated by leftist professors bent on indocrinating their students with their radical agenda. We think that, by and large, Bowdoin's more liberal professors are very fair in the classroom. The problems created by an overwhelmingly liberal faculty are encountered not in the classroom environment, but in the course catalog.
Taken as a whole, much of Bowdoin's curriculum in the humanities and social sciences constitutes a uniformly liberal perspective on both past and present topics. Conservatism carries just as much intellectual weight as modern liberalism does, and any liberal arts college charged with exposing its students to a wide variety of perspectives does its undergraduates a disservice by not including such alternative viewpoints. The result is a perspective gap, and it needs addressing.
It is an understandably difficult problem to solve. While it would be unhelpful to engage hiring practices based on ideology, the College should aim for a depth and breadth of research interests when hiring new professors. This will support the College's goal of providing as many viewpoints on issues, past and present, as possible. Academic hiring practices, and hence course offerings, should be guided by the conviction that an entrenched ideology must never override the ideals of a liberal arts education, which seeks not to persuade students to think in one way over another; put simply, it should provide them with the intellectual agility to understand and evaluate different perspectives before choosing their own.
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