Bias Watch: Georgetown University

Accuracy in Academia ^ | September 19, 2015 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

Occasionally, students actually notice when they are in a biased course.

“I felt a certain idealistic giddiness upon enrolling in ‘Prisons & Punishment,’ a government course introduced during my senior year of college,” Danny Funt writes in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. “It was exciting to attach a resonant cause to academic inquiry, and about 95 percent of my classmates—Republican and Democrat—identified as supporters of criminal justice reform.”

“Our professor had a childhood friend who was wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his parents and then exonerated 17 years later. ‘This will be the most important course you take in college,’ the professor said on the first day of class.”

“I was startled to learn that several classmates would later complain that the class featured liberal advocacy.” Before enrolling at the Columbia University School of Journalism, which, of course, publishes CJR, Funt attended Georgetown, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Hoya.

The Georgetown catalogue does indeed list the P & P course among its offerings, taught by Marc Howard.

We should note that Howard and the course received no feedback similar to that which Funt recorded. Funt’s web page shows he has published extensively on subjects such as The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe.

[Academiadotorg]

what does a metaphorically captive audience learn about a literally penned-up one?

[Mears]

” Funt’s web page shows he has published extensively on subjects such as The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe.”

—

I found this interesting-—and with all of the new “residents” it will only get worse.

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[henkster]

Like this is something new. In the fall of 1980, I took my senior seminar in "Comparative Political Systems" at Indiana University. It should have been called "Soviet Communism Here and Now," as the professor spent the class touting "workers controlling the means of production" and other BS. He'd obviously never worked a day outside academia. I was working my way through college doing commercial construction, and I knew what would happen if you tried to turn he "means of production" over to the guys I worked with.

I wish I'd had the balls to agree with the professor, advocate turning the "means of production" of grades over to the students, voting ourselves A+ grades, and ending the farce of a class.

Now, 35 years later, I realize too many of my colleagues bought into it and they hold high political office in both parties.

[Calvin Locke]

I wonder if the psycho academic Amy Bishop is mentioned in the P&P class?

[ChicagahAl]

"workers controlling the means of production"

Similar experience; working factory labor jobs during the Summer, between college academic years, in the 60's.

The companies where I worked, were happy to hire college students as Summer help, in the hopes that we might return after graduation, to work in management, engineering, finance, etc.

The average factory workers may have been hard-working, decent people; but they certainly weren't anyone you would want playing plant-manager.

Even worse today is the political left's move from Communism toward Fascism. Our left-wing Prof's have become bureaucrats with the power to dictate how private companies can and cannot do business; total control without the government having to bother with "owning the means of production".

[henkster]

The average factory workers may have been hard-working, decent people; but they certainly weren't anyone you would want playing plant-manager.

The same with the construction workers I knew in the late 1970s. The point of Professor Hanson's lecture was not lost on me at the time; he believed that such workers would control the means of production but only through the "guidance" of the Party agitators. In other words, people of his ilk who could not compete economically in the workplace would seize businesses through political means, and run them for themselves as political enterprises, not economic ones.

And that's why socialism/communism fails. A political business plan isn't profitable, because political agitators trying to run a business don't know what they are doing.