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Education suffers when ideology enters classroom

Dec 9, 2002
Author: Christian Hurt, Daily Texan Columnist
Source: The Daily Texan

Since the mid 1960s, American universities have become centers of political indoctrination and activism. This trend began at some of the top schools in the country, most notably the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard and Yale. This form of indoctrination has since trickled down to most major universities, and political activism replaces many fields that previously were scholastic. This year's Wall Street Journal business school rankings show that universities that are now liberal ideological cathedrals did not fare well. When a university's agenda is not based on academics, the students are deprived of skills they need to succeed outside academia.

The reason The Wall Street Journal rankings are important is because their sole criterion is the productivity and market value of working graduates. The Masters of Business Administration programs at universities also remain politically isolated, thus displaying the university's effectiveness in educating people for a competitive business environment under the best circumstances. Business school graduates make the largest impact on society and hence can be used to generalize the capability of all graduates from a given university.

Traditional academic powerhouses who no longer focus on academics now find themselves supplanted by institutions that have sheltered the ideological storm and remain academically rigorous. The largest disappointment in the rankings was Stanford University, which was ranked 39th. The downfall of Stanford can be summed up in Stanford President John Hennessy's own words about the graduate academic agenda: "Our educational purposes will be served best if the country's demographic diversity finds a presence on campus, and we thereby reflect the full range and the full capacity of this society." As long as Stanford's primary goal is the demographic makeup of the student body and not providing an education worthy of the prestige the institution has accumulated and is now losing, Stanford's educational purposes will not be well served. The University was ranked seventh in The Wall Street Journal poll ahead of Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. The University's success in producing productive graduates can be attributed to the fact that professors teach business principles instead of doling out honorary doctorates to Paul Simon and B.B. King like Yale, or reciting euphemisms for leadership or diversity like Stanford.

While the McCombs School of Business did well in The Wall Street Journal, the university as a whole deviates from academic integrity. Last spring Johnnie Cochran spoke in favor of slave reparations at the University-sponsored Heman Sweatt Symposium on Civil Rights. Despite polls showing that 70 percent of the American people oppose slave reparations, no opposing view was presented by the University.

In July, the University and Johns Hopkins University professors began releasing the results of a four-year study on the effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill. The study, conducted at the University by Dr. Ronald Angel and Dr. Laura Lein, is expected to shape the structure of the bill when it is reauthorized later this year. Angel and Lein focused on poor, working families in San Antonio. One of the study's conclusions is that of San Antonio families who earn 1.5 to 1.99 times the poverty line, only 5 percent of their children receive Medicaid. According to Lein, the welfare reform policies have put these children at a greater risk of not receiving health care. For a family of four, the poverty line is $18,100 a year. 199 percent of the poverty line is $36,019, which is above the national average and equates to more than $17 an hour. The fact that a family of four does not receive Medicaid when their income is between $27,150 and $36,019 a year is because they have either private insurance or enough pride to reject government handouts.

The underlying goal of this study is to alter welfare policy and incrementally socialize medical costs. Though both Angel and Lein are renowned experts on poverty, their academic results are politically skewed to advance an ideology. Their use of political overtones is analogous to Pat Buchanan performing a study on immigration that would conclude that the United States needed to build a 30-foot wall spanning the Mexican border from Brownsville to San Diego.

The University, from students to administrators, must be alert to the increasingly top-heavy mixture of politics and academics. Many of the University's undergraduate and graduate programs were recently ranked in the Top 20 by U.S. News & World Report, with the College of Engineering and the McCombs School of Business ranked in the Top 10. These programs will bottom out when political motives outweigh academic teaching and research. When the University produces activists instead of productive workers and researchers, the ability of UT graduates to achieve anything outside the West Mall is almost nonexistent.

Hurt is an electrical engineering senior.

Reprinted with the permission of The Daily Texan.

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