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I watched the same segment with my very conservative father, note I'm as Liberal as you can get, and I thought the whole thing was, as usual, completely blown out of proportion. The only classes that discuss politics are the ones that deal with it, like you said, otherwise they stick to their original points and share facts, it's not my fault that most typical conservatives don't believe in facts, it's theirs so yeah when you live in a fairy tale world anything not apart of that isn't accepted.
lol

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I went to an Urban Arts College studying Television production, Filmmaking and Graphic Design. In the individual majors, unless you know the professors individually you will never know if they were liberal, ultra liberal, moderate, independent or conservative.

But when you get to the liberal arts, there wasnt a single professor who didnt beat their political biases into your heads.


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if you took sociology or gender women courses you would see a bunch of liberal beliefs. It is strange because these sorts of classes were required for where i go.

Shadowy Powerhouse

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if you took sociology or gender women courses you would see a bunch of liberal beliefs. It is strange because these sorts of classes were required for where i go.
Women's Studies is a special case, because of the origin of what they call "Second Wave" feminism in the 1960s counterculture. It pretty much stewed in the most extreme political circles of the day, and took away a tincture of each, most noteworthy being radical socialism. (False consciousness, I am looking at you.)

African-American studies can be the same way, although there's a lot more legitimately academic material to draw on.

Aged Lunatic

I got just the opposite experience in my University time. I was swamped with not just right wing, but Evangelical Christian propaganda and influences, with the sole exception of a woman's studies class headed up by someone straight out of Andrea Dworkin's camp (and who I got into a lot of arguments with).

Shadowy Powerhouse

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GunsmithKitten
straight out of Andrea Dworkin's camp
Oh, how I hate that woman.

And MacKinnon, they're some froot loops.

Liberal Genius

You don't want me to get started about the Canadian Federation of Students on campuses in Canada.

There's LIBERAL, and then there's plain ol' socialist crap.

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Wendigo
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if you took sociology or gender women courses you would see a bunch of liberal beliefs. It is strange because these sorts of classes were required for where i go.
Women's Studies is a special case, because of the origin of what they call "Second Wave" feminism in the 1960s counterculture. It pretty much stewed in the most extreme political circles of the day, and took away a tincture of each, most noteworthy being radical socialism. (False consciousness, I am looking at you.)

African-American studies can be the same way, although there's a lot more legitimately academic material to draw on.

Gender women study is a special case & it is extreme however it has A LOT of connections with sociology teachings. The biggest connection i find is the emphasis on social construction.
Not all feminists/gender women studies classes are extreme. What they want to achieve is toned down... they don't outright say what should be and what shouldn't be...they give us material that leads us to a path that they want. That is how I feel. However I admit I can agree with some feminist ideas.
Also I think these classes tend to generalize people... but my gender women studies professor is saying not to generalize people... however so many ideas that she teaches...do generalize people.

Shadowy Powerhouse

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x_DivineDesire_x

Gender women study is a special case & it is extreme however it has A LOT of connections with sociology teachings. The biggest connection i find is the emphasis on social construction.
From what I can tell, that idea was ripped whole cloth out of anthropology, where it refers primarily to race. Substituting race (which actually is a socially constructed concept without a biological backing, we all came from Africa) for gender (which is actually a biological fact with socially constructed implications) is pretty clumsy.

Partly, this is the result of the way the social sciences are propagated. Social psychology, for example, is in large part built out of spare parts from economics. Evolutionary psychology thinks that it bears any relationship whatsoever to biology. (But doesn't.) In general, the social sciences believe that they should have porous borders, sharing their innovations with one another and borrowing them freely from others.

This becomes problematic, because 90% of all social science is actually hastily-fabricated bullshit.

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Wendigo
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Gender women study is a special case & it is extreme however it has A LOT of connections with sociology teachings. The biggest connection i find is the emphasis on social construction.

From what I can tell, that idea was ripped whole cloth out of anthropology, where it refers primarily to race. Substituting race (which actually is a socially constructed concept without a biological backing, we all came from Africa) for gender (which is actually a biological fact with socially constructed implications) is pretty clumsy.

Partly, this is the result of the way the social sciences are propagated. Social psychology, for example, is in large part built out of spare parts from economics. Evolutionary psychology thinks that it bears any relationship whatsoever to biology. (But doesn't.) In general, the social sciences believe that they should have porous borders, sharing their innovations with one another and borrowing them freely from others.

This becomes problematic, because 90% of all social science is actually hastily-fabricated bullshit.


I have skepticism about the reasoning of the social sciences ... however i don't have skepticism for the same reason as you, i think.

However It does sort of make sense - how some things were taken from anthropology and other things.

It is pretty hasty with theories and such, but this is supposed to be based on observations of general human behavior. I think that using science or logic or something...can't really help with understanding people. The brain is really complex and trying to understand what someone is thinking or what they are subconsciously thinking is hard. So everything that they do come up with is going to be taken from something else... ? yes no?

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The criticism I'd generally make of the social sciences is that they're an attempt to take the particular and to make it general. Which only works out well if the slice of the population you're directly addressing is identical with the rest of it, and not fine if it isn't. (Especially not fine if the things being read into that smaller population are not actually evident in it, which happens.)

On one hand, anthropology has been a major practitioner of this problematic approach to establishing eternal verities. Participant observation, of course, draws lines of connection between interaction with a few members of a tribe or nation or culture and the way that said culture would operate for anybody who became involved with it. On the other hand, participant observation at least accumulates detailed information on a small snapshot of the larger culture it purports to describe, which puts it a step or two ahead of some other methods of inquiry.
Actually, I did get a D- on a paper, and I highly suspect it was because I took a Conservative standpoint (it was an essay on NAFTA and whether free trade is positive or negative for Canada). No matter what sources I used, what critiques I had of free trade, I got a D- while the laissez-faire standpoints got A's and B's.

I don't have enough evidence to back it up, but a highly intelligent girl I just dated also just failed an essay, which was a critique of modern feminism, in the same university and faculty.

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Really interesting thread!

Obviously I can't comment on how it works in the states, but here in the UK it is common for lecturers to make their political allegiances blatant. We deem that once people are into tertiary education, they're mature enough to be able to make and stand by their own opinions. I've never felt that I shouldn't tell students I'm looking at a topic through a certain political lens for example - in fact I think it helps them make sense of how important bias and personal beliefs can be in academic literature. They need to learn how to evaluate for themselves.

The topic comes up quite often about how it seems that while higher education staff are mostly left wing liberals, the majority of students are right leaning conservatives. (In complete contrast to the old truism that people start off left and idealistic, slowly moving right over the course of their career.)
Bill O'Reilly isn't a good source for anything other than entertainment.
Most of the time, in my experience, political pressure from professors is not a big problem.

That said, I've still clashed with professors on a few things. I respect my professors but sometimes I feel that their statements or assumptions need to be questioned and I'm not going to let them use their position of authority to avoid that challenge. A better story would be, bias or not, do students challenge their professors, or do they just assume that the professor automatically knows more than them or that it would be rude to ask?

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