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David Cordell
Sandra,
Of course, I don't think universities are similar to communist re-education camps.
I believe in a broad liberal arts education.
In business schools, where I teach, there is not much in the way of political and social indoctrination. We don't teach history, government, sociology, or anything that would tend to attract left-leaning or totally leftist faculty. We are more like a professional school teaching business/management skills. We are capitalists, so we are implicitly teaching capitalism, I suppose.
My Faculty Senate, of which I was Secretary for ten years, held a vote among the faculty to address the now-eliminated Trump policy regarding international students. The policy said that an international student who was taking only online courses couldn't maintain a student visa. That is, if it is all online, there is no reason for them to be here. The point of the policy was to lean on universities to open up in the fall. I was feeling politively toward the petition, which opposed the policy, until I read the word "xenophobic" which was clearly directed at Trump himself. I viewed that as an inflammatory and unnecessary inclusion.
So, I was among the small minority who voted against the petition. What particularly disturbed me about the petition vote was that it revealed how everyone voted. The problem with that is that untenured professors are at the mercy of tenured professors, deans, provosts, and presidents when the up-or-out tenure decision comes. A signed vote against the petition has a good possibility of raising the ire of one of the rabid anti-Trumpites, and it could definitely torpedo a career. Requiring the name of the voter was intimidation, and I let the president of the Faculty Senate know that that's what I thought.
I just saw that the California State University System is going to require an ethnic studies course of a social justice course for graduation. Guess how those courses will turn out.
Universities strive for diversity of color, but not diversity of thought. People who pursue academic careers are typically satisfied with the nature of the environment, so there is something of an inbreeding. Liberals beget liberals.
The bottom line is that I do not have an answer to your question. Political, predominently left-wing, pressures, both internally and externally are very strong. There is no effort to portray the USA as a positive force, but it is perfectly acceptable to express the opposite view. I have judiciously avoided expressing political or social views in class that could offend my students. That was certainly not the approach of my liberal arts professors at UT Austin. Conservative students get used to clamming up and/or regurgitating whatever the liberal professor has expressed.
Semi-related small point -- when I was chairman of the Ideas and Issues Committee at UT Austin, one of the speakers I brought to campus was Gloria Steinem.
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