The first article below, in Persuasion, is a précis of a much longer one by the same authors that I read recently; it’s not yet published it but you can access it below; click on the second shot to see the bigger piece.
The upshot is that the authors examined 27 million syllabi from colleges around the world by “scraping” them from websites. The object was to take three contentious topics: race discrimination, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion, and answer these questions for each:
- For each topic, how often was a “progressive” paper or book assigned if it was assigned by itself? (The three areas and views are those promoting the ubiquity and strength of race discrimination, works favoring Palestine as an oppressed territory, and works favoring choice inb abortion.)
- Ditto for “anti-progressive” papers or books (works critical of others that claimed to bigotry, especially in the criminal justice system, works favoring Israel or critical of pro-Palestinian works, and works taking a “pro-life” view.
- For those courses in which “progressive” works were assigned, how often were works critical of the progressive readings assigned as opposed to readings supportive of the progressive readings?
- Ditto for courses assigning “anti-progressive” works: how often were works critical of those assigned as well works supporting the anti-progressive views.
The object was to see how often faculty were exposing students to both sides of an argument. That would have been the result if “progressive” works were often assigned with works that were critical of them as opposed to works that simply buttressed them.
The upshot is what you might expect: “anti-progressive” (or “conservative”) works were assigned with progressive ones far less often than were works that buttressed the progressive point of view. Conclusion: liberal academia is not exposing students to credible alternative points of view (and yes, the authors took care to examine cite only works that academically credible).
Classic “progressive” works used in their analysis include the following; you won’t know the critical views so much but you can see them in the paper. I’d recommend reading the big unpublished paper if you have time as it has a lot more data.
- The classic progressive views of racism in the criminal-justice system: Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me
- The classic progressive view of the Israel/Palestine conflict (and oppression of Arabs in general): Edward Said’s book Orientalism
- The classic progressive “pro-choice” paper: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s paper “A Defense of Abortion“
What to read. Here’s the précis:
and the longer paper from which the above is drawn (click to read):
Now both of these papers lay out possible problems with the results. Still, the results they got are pretty much what you’d expect given the pervasive liberalism of college professors. Progressive texts are assigned by themselves much more often than are conservative papers on the same ideas; but, more important, when progressive papers are assigned, they are assigned much more often along with papers that support them than with papers that are critical of them. This is not what we’d expect if professors are supposed to stimulate students by teaching them scholarly controversies about divisive issues. Instead, we get what looks like propagandizing. Again, I may not be giving a good summary of what the papers found, but I would recommend reading either the Persuasion paper or, preferably, the unpublished one.
Here’s a summary of data from syllabi containing works about race. This comes from the Persuasion paper:
Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.
Consider, for example, Michelle Alexander’s important 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. Alexander argued that mass incarceration emerged after the collapse of the Jim Crow system in the South, largely as a way to reestablish the subjugation of black Americans. It would be hard to overstate its influence. Ibram X. Kendi called it “the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter.” And on college campuses, it became the assigned reading. On the topic of race and the criminal justice system, no other work is more popular in the syllabi database; it appears in more than four thousand syllabi in U.S. universities and colleges.
As soon as it was published, The New Jim Crow stirred contention within academia. The most prominent critic was James Forman, Jr., a professor at Yale Law School. In a seminal working paper, Forman challenged Alexander’s thesis. Among other shortcomings, Forman wrote that The New Jim Crow “fails to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment, ignores violent crimes while focusing almost exclusively on drug crimes, obscures class distinctions within the African American community, and overlooks the effects of mass incarceration on other racial groups.” Forman’s work culminated in a book titled Locking Up Our Own, a well-regarded work that won the Pulitzer Prize.
How often is Forman’s book assigned along with Alexander’s? Less than four percent of the time. Other prominent critics—like Michael Fortner, John Pfaff, and Patrick Sharkey—are assigned even less often. Fortner’s important book The Black Silent Majority, for example, is assigned with The New Jim Crow less than two percent of the time.
So what is assigned with The New Jim Crow? Mostly books that are broadly aligned with it. The three most commonly co-assigned texts include Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. We estimate that less than 10 percent of professors assigning Alexander’s book actually teach the controversy surrounding it.
That’s pretty depressing. All three issues fit the same pattern, though the issue of abortion is more balanced. In general, important progressive texts are assigned with texts that support them, not texts that criticize them. A summary of the other issues from Persuasion:
Orientalism is among the most popular books assigned in the United States, showing up in nearly four thousand courses in the syllabus database. But although it was a major source of controversy, both then and now, it is rarely assigned with any of the critics [Edward Said] sparred with, like Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, or Samuel Huntington. Instead, it’s most often taught with books by fellow luminaries of the postmodern left, such as Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault.
What about the ethics of abortion? This question is taught in a more even-handed way, at least compared to the other issues we studied. More than a third of syllabi that assign Judith Jarvis Thomson’s classic defense of abortion rights, for example, pair it with a pro-life voice. Yet even in this case, we observe the same pattern: Most professors shield their students from scholarly controversy.
The authors’ conclusion in their big paper is that America’s waning trust of academia can be restored by teaching disagreements, not just one side of an issue. They emphasize that they are not saying to simply assign more conservative intellectual works, but simply to assign works that are critical of popular works like Alexander, Said, and Thomson. (I have read two of these and found both Alexander and Thomson very persuasive. Yet I didn’t even know about the credible scholarly works critical of what I read.) Yes, some of the critics are conservative, but not all of them. The point is to teach the controversies about live scholarly debates—though not with settled issues like evolution. Ideology here is less important than presenting students with the clash of ideas and getting them to think and debate.
I found one more bit of the Persuasion paper pretty horrifying:
Perhaps the most troubling objection to our project, and the most emphatic complaint we’ve heard since posting our paper, is that now is not the time to be raising these concerns. In the face of Trump’s blunderbuss war on the universities, we shouldn’t air our profession’s dirty laundry. One colleague, whose work we deeply respect, told us that it could be used “as a pretext” to do even more damage to the institutions that we love.
But we are convinced that there are other dangers to ignoring a real problem—dangers that are every bit as existential as Trump’s war on the universities. If we professors suspend our critical inquiries in the face of this emergency, then Trump has truly destroyed higher education.
This is precisely the criticism that some miscreants have leveled at the recent anthology compiled by Lawrence Krauss: The War on Science, a compendium of chapters in which over thirty authors mostly take the left to task for its inimical and ideological effects on science. We were told exactly what Shields et al. were: “now is not the time to show how the left is hurting science because Trump is hurting it much more.” That itself is a debatable point, of course, especially in view of the different ways the “hurt” is occurring. Regardless, telling critics of “progressivism” to shut up because we need to unite in criticizing Trump is badly misguided. It goes against everything that academia is supposed to promote, including freedom of speech and academic freedom. It is the combination of these two freedoms that is supposed to yield truth, not a one-sided view that leans toward the left.
I am a leftist, but also an academic, and I think that the big Shields et al. paper is important not only to buttress what we’re supposed to be doing, but also to stem the ongoing decline in the reputation of American universities. .
Unfortunately, elite Higher Ed will be as open to this work as WPATH is to the Cass review. If you want your student to get a balanced education, look to Southern universities. Even then, be careful. Duke is in Durham, NC, a town I predict would elect Mamdani as their mayor.
It’s really extraordinary how there is no self-correcting device in these fields…..clearly the professors don’t want it, but nevertheless, Why isn’t there one?
In some courses the content of the teaching is dictated by external professional bodies, as the American Chemical Society does for Organic Chemistry. You have to teach the Markovnikov Rule (and why it works), even though “them as has, gits”* is profoundly inequitable. That’s the guardrail against teaching nonsense. Which is why the University of Toronto medical school no longer requires Organic Chemistry preparation for admission and frowns on taking any hard science at all. Yes I know medicine isn’t really a scientific discipline for most practitioners anymore.
In transgender nonsense, the guardrail should be the ethical obligation of the medical profession to uphold the privilege of self-regulation the state grants to it by getting the word out that poisoning and mutilating physically healthy people is professional misconduct. Why it has not done so will be for the historians to mull over. Meantime the state has to step in and regulate directly, as 20-odd states and one Canadian province are trying to do, at least to protect minors.
But who cares what sociology departments teach, I suppose, as long as graduates write papers buttressing what they got indoctrinated about as undergrads?
(* Morrison and Boyd.)
(*Morrison and Boyd.)
That brings back memories. I was once an OChem student. Indeed, I still have a copy of M&B in my office.
In my own reading of modern Sociology, the biggest criticism I have is when the author doesn’t look beyond their topic at any comparative situations. X experienced discrimination in this role. Yes, but to what extent did Y and Z?. Maybe it’s the situation and not the people? We need to be teaching kids in secondary school that there is always another perspective to be considered.
‘ When anyone tells you anything about anything your first question should always be “in comparison to what?” ‘.
I’ve taken to calling this Ito’s Law after my colleague who says this to many of our courses.
Or, as I tend to say it “What’s your control group?”.
Thomas Sowell has made such a point in some interviews.
I’m not sure where it came from but it’s … [gonna go off here] sort of like an intellectual life-preserver – as in, when totally swamped in things in some instance, that question helps get to the surface…
An economist is asked: How’s your wife?
He replies: Compared to what?
These findings comport with my experience. As I was finishing my Ph.D. a new program director was promoted to run the program. Among her first actions was to survey recent grads to ask what were the program’s weaknesses/areas in need of improvement. My answer was simple: Professors needed to assign readings critical of orthodoxies. Somewhere along the line I’d developed the habit of reading beyond the assigned stuff. Ideas gleaned from these extra-curricular readings were making it into my papers. In some (many?) instances my professors were completely unfamiliar with some of these criticisms. In one case, a professor asked me to send him five of the best/most influential (IMO) papers on a particular topic. He was surprised to learn of them, I think, because they were coming from adjacent fields of study. My professors were smart people and good thinkers. Falling into info bubbles and scholarly echo chambers is an easy pitfall to stumble into.
The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report is a national survey of 6,269 tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty across 55 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
https://www.thefire.org/facultyreport
On page 13 of the report are the results for a question about topics for which respondents report difficulty having an open and honest conversation on their campus:
Contemporary academe’s universally assigned sacred texts, such as Edward Said’s “Orientalism”, serve the brainwashing function that the texts by Augustine of Hippo and by Thomas Aquinas served in the medieval university. Paul Goodman was exactly correct and ahead of his time (by half a century) when he referred to our academics as the “schoolmonks”.
What is the operating system of Leftism?
The answer is : dialectic
Sigh. Some of my colleagues have troubles with these issues, but I don’t. In mathematics and mathematical physics, they haven’t figured out how to politicize things. I can teach the mathematics of stress tensors in solids under pressure without being accused of being racist colonialist or woke left. I don’t know how to teach antiracist or anticolonialist perspectives on quantum spin. Nonsense like “antiracist math” occurs among the math ed people, not the proper math department.
But colleagues of mine in history or English feel pressure from both sides. Jerry must also get a bit of that since evolutionary biology necessarily entails discussions of sex.
…and genes.
If you teach the mathematics of stress tensors without also denouncing colonialism, that will do harm to members of minoritized groups by, uhhhm, triggering something.
When you’re teaching psychopaths like Fannon and idiot Edward Said.. what could one expect (sigh)?
This comports with my (limited) experience talking to under 30s, women especially. Admittedly NYC is a bubble. If we elect Mandami nobody should listen to any NYer ever again. He is a consequence of the woke madness.
D.A.
NYC
How a Small Elite College in Maine Influenced Mamdani’s World View. New York Times, Oct 28, 2025
The mayoral candidate has said his education at Bowdoin College was formative. But critics say that his degree exemplifies how colleges steep students in leftist dogma.
https://archive.ph/H1U4z
If Mr. Mamdani becomes the next mayor of New York, as polls suggest, he will be mold-breaking in striking ways. He would be the first Muslim, the first democratic socialist and, at 34, among the youngest to hold the office.
He would also become one of the most visible representations of a new generation of progressives — whose formative years as young adults were shaped by elite colleges where, over the last decade, theories of social and racial justice became even more deeply ingrained in liberal arts education.
Mr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there — readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus — is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.
More on Mamdani:
‘Slow Poison’ Review: Idi Amin Reconsidered
The father of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says the notorious Ugandan dictator was really an anticolonial hero.
https://archive.ph/jhe6q
That was a surprisingly informative and unbiased article for the NYT. I’ve been wondering about Mamdani’s degree — specifically, how well rounded it may or may not have been. Appreciate the link. I can’t remember where I read an article that said he’d seen colonialism up close (not an exact quote) when he lived in Uganda and South Africa. The same article described his family as “Indian intellectuals” which made me wonder which side of colonialism he actually experienced. And didn’t they move to the US when he was a very young boy?
Idi Amin persecuted the South Asians living in Uganda, drove them out. Many fled to U.S. and Canada. Bizarre that he’d think Amin a hero…unless he is one of those communists who would denounce his own parents as enemies of the regime.
I’m puzzled. I suppose I should read the father’s book. So far, I’m getting a “I hate you, but I hate him/them more” sort of ingratitude all around this family. Sorry if that doesn’t make sense. I’ve had a long and trying day.
Let’s call this what it is….right, left and lunacy. I’ve recently had two kids make it through Queen’s University, one relatively unscathed in economics. The other in philosophy was heavily weighted in lunacy. Now a girlfriend of another one is in psychology. Again, too much lunacy. All the topics you’ve listed, and the usual gender fluidity, but add in a few others like why we shouldn’t have pets or eat animal products of any sort, and another gem…normalizing pedophilia or it’s woke name “minor attracted persons”. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39279235/
The kids are not given both sides of any argument, and both in group settings and in answering the profs, in person and on exams, there is the strong impression that what they’ve been “taught” is the correct answer and if they question or disagree it will not go well. Ashamed to be an alumni right now.
These are interesting issues. We should be careful about how we frame ‘teaching the controversy’. Recall the use of that phrase by creationists to justify including creationist arguments in biology classes. Most of the readers of this site probably agree that this particular controversy is not a debate about facts, but rather about faith and oppose including creationism in science class.
I will use the concept of systemic racism against black americans as an example. There are two issues here: Does systemic racism (the idea that discrimination has been institutionalized) exist? This is a subject that can be investigated objectively but it requires careful definition of the concept and careful designation of the observations that would support or invalidate the concept. A related question is whether racism is justified. Proponents of the affirmative view usually cite objective evidence to support their viewpoint (e.g., black people have lower IQ, are inherently lazy, etc.). It’s important, when advocating viewpoint diversity, that one differentiate debates about facts from debates about values. Conflating the two issues leads to unnecessary conflict.
Not sure I follow. Systemic racism is the assertion that lower achievement by black people is due to institutionalized white racism — showing up to work on time and delaying pregnancy until you can afford children are “white” values not largely shared by blacks and therefore racially coded — and not due to shortcomings of individuals who fail as a result. You can measure this all you want but all you’ll find is, yup, blacks are under-represented and poorer and die younger, and have different socio-cultural habits. At issue is the mechanism that converts these differences into social failure.
What you can’t measure is the role that racism by white people plays in causing this because it’s a question of language, not measurable facts. Blacks don’t defer pregnancy and blacks achieve poorly. We all agree. The critical race theorists say that designing a society that rewards punctuality and imposes opportunity costs on fatherless family formation (where the state plays the role of the father) is inherently racist, even if no white individual is consciously racist,* because it holds black people back by inflicting failure on them with disparate impact.
This is simply an unfalsifiable assertion. All we can respond is, “Well, tough. Them’s the rules,” which causes shrieks of protest. What the critical race theorists want is that black values should be treasured, with money injected from somewhere else to make black people as well off as whites, despite their acknowledged different value structures.
Critical theorists are, in effect, arguing that black people really do have lower IQ and poor social and work habits, just as the racists say. But these differences should not be viewed as deficiencies that hold blacks back. Rather, the systemic racism that converts these value-neutral differences into poor achievement should be dismantled by “decolonizing” society, i.e., removing white people from positions of economic and political power.
Since CRT is just an ideology that makes unfalsifiable assertions, I don’t see how you can air different viewpoints in school. You could permit or even challenge students to ask, “What is the evidence that CRT is true?” But under CRT asking for evidence instead of preventing hurt feelings is racist on its face, and anti-feminine, too. You have to be willing to counter “anti-racism” with what the anti-racists call racism. Are we ready for that?
(* The CRTs are saying to whites, Yes, we agree and accept that you aren’t racist in the old Jim Crow sense. Good for you. It doesn’t get you off the hook, though.)
On this note, I’m looking at taking an anthropology class on human evolution at my university, and the main recommended reading is “Biological anthropology: concepts and connections” by Agustin Fuentes. I’ve seen from other posts here that you’re not a fan of his ideological takes; I was wondering if you might be able to recommend a good biological anthropology textbook to read in its place. I’d prefer to get grounded in the basic concepts without the “progressive” ideology.
Thanks!