College is liberal indoctrination!

And this must be the liberal brainwashing headpiece

Sometimes, you just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. This new Faux News “report” actually makes the claim that a college education is little more than – wait for it – liberal propaganda!!! *thunderclap* … That is, according to the Faux News cronies’ rather prejudiced interpretation of the conclusions of a rather little-known study that they don’t even know the methodology of.

I wanted to embed the video but can’t find the option. (If someone figures it out, please let me know.) Their general argument is: after polling a pool of about 14,000 college graduates, they found that whilst these alumni were not generally any more informed in terms of general civics aptitudes – reportedly, a full third weren’t even able to identify the three branches of the US government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) – they tended to lean quite markedly towards the lefty side of various social issues, such as abortion rights, gay marriage, and so on. Of course, this is supposedly the results of a “lack of diversity” in colleges and of all those doggone libural college professor pushing their views onto students, and whatever.

Let’s just assume that the study itself isn’t flawed in some manner (I don’t see any real reason to believe that it is, but some proper disclosure of context and methodology is always appreciated) and that college graduates really do lean more to the left in general. First: there’s no reason to assume that this is due to liberal views or beliefs being pushed upon impressionable students. There could be any number of factors influencing the results of this poll; for all we know, there could be just skewed a conservative-liberal ratio in the students entering college. Personally, with all the conservatives’ ire over schooling and public indoctrination and such nonsense, it’s really not that hard to imagine how the majority of college students may very well be mostly liberal already by the time they apply for college.

Also, I’ve got news for Faux News (and anyone else who believes their skewed interpretation of these study results): it’s not a “lack of diversity” in ideological viewpoints and political stances that leads to more students leaning to the left of the political spectrum. It’s quite the opposite: if anything, it’s precisely an affluence in all sorts of diversity of thought and beliefs that is most likely to “skew” someone’s own ideas towards liberalism in general. After all, this is the very point that Tucker Carlson actually argued in the video:

CARLSON: ‘I think that there are there are other benefits to college: socialization, broadening of horizons, new experiences, etc. – you can definitely make a case for college.’

This aspect of college life – being exposed to new ideas, new beliefs, different manners of thinking – are the exact things that open students’ minds, and in so doing, basically promote the sort of values and thinking that are characteristic to liberalism: freethought, open-mindedness and acceptance. To say that college promotes liberalism in students is definitely a truth – but nothing like the biased, mangled manner presented by Faux News, where this is supposedly the result of indoctrination and propaganda.

(via @todayspolitics)