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"Professors Found to Keep Political Views Quiet, but Students Detect Them."

Now, there's an article I'd love to talk about, on one of my favorite subjects, but it's in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and you need to pay to see it. How tedious of them not to make it available! How annoyingly irrelevant they've made themselves! If they care about education so much, let us read the articles.

Actually, do we really need that article? It looks like they interviewed a bunch of students. So, students and former students: Talk about whether your teachers refrained from the overt expression of political views and, if they did, whether you were able to detect the teachers' politics anyway.

And let me tag on an extra subject, the pedagogical choice to lay your cards on the table.

This is something some law professors do. Many of us believe that judicial decisions are infused with politics, that judges have a political ideology that affects the way cases are decided. We may think that is wrong and, to that end, want students to detect ideology in the cases (which are written in a style that is intended to look neutral). Or we may think it is the way -- whether we like it or not -- the human mind works, and therefore that it's something a sophisticated reader needs to learn how to perceive.

Either way, law professors might want to concede that our politics may or will affect anything we say on the subject, and, since we are trying to reveal things about judges, we shouldn't hide things about ourselves. With this thinking, some law professors like to confess their political ideology. Presumably, this is done briefly, with assurances that the teacher will strive to cover the full range of thinking on the subject and to grade the exams with rigorous fairness.

So would you rather your teachers shut up about their political views and left you guessing or even believing that the teaching is neutral? Or would you rather your teachers -- when teaching subjects affected by politics -- made a brief confession of their viewpoint? When your teachers don't confess, can you tell for sure what the political views are or do you just muse about it?

Full post as published by Althouse on October 17, 2008 (boomark / email).