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Contentious topics are often taught in college classrooms from a uniformly one-sided perspective, according to newly published research that used the Open Syllabus Project, which hosts over 27 million syllabi, to develop its findings. 

The research focused on three topics — “racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion”  — to determine how controversial issues are presented.

The research primarily looked at assigned reading materials to conclude that “professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies.”

“Personally, I thought we’d find some imbalance, some activist teaching,” co-author Jon  Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, told The College Fix. “I just didn’t expect it to be the norm in the cases we studied. That was genuinely surprising to me.”

The 66-page working paper, “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,” was also co-authored by Claremont McKenna College Professor of Government Stephanie Muravchik and Scripps College Professor of Philosophy Yuval Avnur.

“We were concerned about the health of liberal education, especially in an age when our democracy needs it so desperately,” Shields said. “One way liberal education supports democracy is by shaping the next generation of citizens. And citizens need to acquire both a fluency with the issues that shape our public life as well as an ability to critically assess them.”

“So, we wondered: How well are we in the university fulfilling this fundamental mission?”

The trio looked at how prominent works pertaining to select issues are taught alongside equally influential or authoritative works that present opposing views. Turns out, not often.

And that’s a problem, the scholars wrote.

“[S]tudents need to acquire some fluency in the intellectual controversies that shape our nation and world,” they wrote. “If all we expose them to are disagreements within cramped intellectual spaces, then we are not preparing them to think seriously about contentious public issues, much less exercise power over them one day.”

‘Distorted sense of social reality’

The Open Syllabus Project contains 27 million syllabi scraped from the websites of universities, mostly located in English-speaking countries. 

According to the research, influential works such as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Edward Said’s “Orientalism” are taught more often than John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

The former argues the American criminal justice system perpetuates racial oppression. The latter is highly critical of Israel. Yet neither, the scholars found, are regularly presented with critics of those works. Instead, such works, they noted, are generally assigned with “fellow travelers.”

Conversely, they also found, when critics of Alexander’s or Said’s works are taught, they are typically taught in addition to the more left-leaning works of Alexander and Said, indicating that there does not appear to be a comparable bias by presumably more right-leaning scholars when assigning texts.

With regard to the issue of abortion, the scholars found that although a similar left-leaning bias was present, it was considerably less prominent than that which was identified for classes dealing with the other two issues.

Nonetheless, the scholars argued that their work still reveals a strong bias in the materials selected to introduce students to important controversies in our society and that this has serious implications. 

Students, they wrote, are not being prepared “to think seriously about contentious public issues, much less exercise power over them one day” or acquiring “the civic skills they will need to become citizens in a pluralistic nation.”

Additionally, the scholars noted, “insofar as we’re educating tomorrow’s leaders, they probably won’t lead us anywhere we want to go if they have a distorted sense of social reality.”

Universities should be cultivating “intellectual virtues, like curiosity, critical thinking skills, and intellectual humility,” they stated.  Yet, instead, they noted, universities are cultivating adherence to orthodoxy and presenting false intellectual consensuses.

Looking forward, the trio wrote in their report, “universities must recommit themselves to teaching our disagreements.” 

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