Do Radical Professors Produce Radical Students?

A simple but telling little study from the University of Brussels challenges the idea that college kids are gobs of clay passively waiting to be molded by their professors. In general, students of social science are more likely to graduate college as self-defined leftists, while law and economics graduates tilt the other way. To find out why, sociologists gave various cohorts of university students surveys when they entered their schools and when they graduated. They found that while socialization—that is, time with their presumably Marxist professors and fellow students—may have had some effect, the effect of selection was much stronger. Left-leaning students were selecting into disciplines like sociology, right-leaning into economics. Both moved only very slightly to the left during their time as students.

The acknowledgement that 18-year-olds already have robust opinion-making capacities provides an obvious challenge to decades of conservative hysteria over radicals running our universities. But any finding of this nature also challenges liberal notions of the transformative power of education. Data on, say, the provision of comprehensive sex education to high schoolers and its resultant effect on behavior are pretty uninspiring, as are data on abstinence-only programs. Culture wars seem to thrive on blank slatism.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: college, generation y

Kerry Howley is a contributing editor at Reason Magazine and an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa's literary nonfiction program.

Comments

People tend to self select a

By: elixabeth | Tue, 07/14/2009 - 15:11

People tend to self select a lot, but more people seem to be taking double and triple majors. Or getting multiple view points. If people are allowed to follow inertia they are likely to pick the first specialization they encounter but if they are forced to be in a more competitive arena they might think about things more.

People on average aren't likely to shake up society but hopefully people are being forced to be more then average these days. Being able to read really doesn't cut the whole literacy thing anymore, our standards are very very low and as they are artificially low I think this means that soon they must rise at least to some degree.

Medicine

By: cpowers | Tue, 07/14/2009 - 14:31

I don't know the politics of my medical school classmates in Arkansas, but almost every resident and attending physician I've ever met leans strongly right. When I was in residency during 2004 election, my attendings joked that we could only take time of to vote if we were voting for Bush. The doctor's lounge where I work now is almost always tuned to Fox News. Anecdotal evidence I know, but still true.

wondering about other fields

By: Vanessa | Tue, 07/14/2009 - 14:19

I'm curious about field that aren't as closely associated with one political POV or the other. Medicine, education, science, law... I'm going to check the study but if it doesn't deal with more neutral fields I'll be disappointed, since those might be areas where people without strong views are pulled to one side or the other.