Thread by @sfmcguire79

“College teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme, and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.”

“Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system.”

🧵

“Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’ (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi,” but the work of one of her leading critics “is paired with it less than 4% of the time.”

Other critics are taught even less.

“Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault.”

This analysis is from a new paper looking at syllabi in the Open Syllabus Project, “a database of more than 27 million syllabi scraped from the web.”
drive.google.com/file/d/1L6aUnf…

To take another example, Edward Said’s “Orientalism” is “the 16th-most-assigned text in the database, appearing in nearly 16,000 courses.”

(This is even more remarkable when you consider that most of the other top books are textbooks and style guides.)
analytics.opensyllabus.org/record/works

Said’s book is almost never taught alongside popular counter perspectives.

In general, when it comes to the “Israel-Palestinian conflict,” the authors “found that the most commonly assigned works were sharply critical of Israel.”

Their conclusion: “It’s hard for us to see a path toward restoring public confidence in the university that doesn’t involve curricular reform.”

“If we shut out the views of half or more of the population, we shouldn’t be surprised when the democratic process leads to the diminution of our subsidies and other privileges.”

“We depoliticize higher education only by politicizing our courses—in the sense of building more contention into them.”

Link: wsj.com/opinion/eviden…