A study of millions of college syllabi found that courses on polarizing topics, such as abortion, race, and the Israel-Palestine war, almost always contain a serious bias that prevents students from fully understanding or analyzing the contention, The Free Press reported Nov. 3.
College professors Jon Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik analyzed the reading material given to students for each course to assess whether it provided several or limited perspectives on the course’s topic. They wrote for The Free Press, “Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.”
According to their report, more than 4,000 classes focused on racial bias in the criminal justice system overwhelmingly included Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow, and less than 4% of those also assign Yale law professor James Forman Jr.’s 2017 book Locking Up Our Own, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critical analysis of Alexander’s book. Nor is it common for other critiques of The New Jim Crow to be assigned. Instead, students often are assigned literature that is “broadly aligned” with the text. Additionally, the professors said that they “estimate that less than 10 percent of professors assigning Alexander’s book actually teach the controversy surrounding it.”
They discovered similar trends when looking at courses that cover the Israel-Palestine conflict. According to their research, professors often assign anti-Zionist texts but do not also require students to read books offering opposing arguments or perspectives. More than one-third of abortion ethics classes, on the other hand, had both pro-abortion and pro-life assignments, though the researchers noted that professors tended to “shield their students from scholarly controversy.”
The professors hypothesized that the bias could stem from course instructors teaching material outside their field of study, but added that “We also suspect that too many professors, swept up in this or that moral cause, use the classroom as an opportunity to press that cause onto their students.”
“The biggest problem with this line of reasoning was identified by John Stuart Mill long ago. Put bluntly, it’s arrogance and, worse, paternalism, based on an assumption of infallibility,” the professors wrote. “There is no good reason to suppose that any of these thinkers have a monopoly on wisdom, or the right to decide these matters for students, when there is a real debate among the experts.”
The professors concluded that providing various perspectives and clashing opinions in college courses would allow students to become “more fluent in the ideas that divide both intellectuals and the public, and sharpen the analytic skills that they will need to make the world better.”
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