<p>Steve Pinker was heavily recruited by Summers, so his opinion was not free of bias. it was a mutual admiration society.</p>
<p>not the ones i know. . .in fact, shame on them if they do. it’s a catholic school which means one will feel comfortable there if they were raised as a catholic, but if not the views of the church are not shoved down one’s throat.</p>
<p>What is he interested in majoring in? Maybe that would help us figure out which colleges to suggest. I think you might be new to the world of LACs and we could perhaps recommend some to look at.</p>
<p>I would think that Holy Cross would be worth taking a look at. I would think the student bodies at Vassar, Wesleyan, Middlebury, and Oberlin are skewed toward liberal. I am afraid I don’t know much about colleges in the PA,NY, and MA areas, but perhaps someone can help.</p>
<p>My feeling is that a place like Williams or Amherst would suit the OP’s son just fine. I think it probably depends on the department for a place like Harvard.</p>
<p>Some prestigious LAC’s do attract people with a liberal agenda, axe to grind, whatever you want to call it. You know, where people are more interested in going to protests and promoting their ‘issue’ than serious intellectual discussion of the subject matter. But I don’t get that impression about Williams or Amherst. I think it probably exists in pockets at Harvard but its avoidable, at least as an undergrad.
I don’t have first-hand knowledge of Oberlin, but I’ve heard that it is ultra-liberal and might be uncomfortable for the OP’s son.</p>
<p>Not sure yet, maybe business…and yes, I have no clue about LACs , that’s why I asked.</p>
<p>What is left…BU, Uconn, Northeastern, Bentley…what else? He wants to stay in NE</p>
<p>I have never experienced a professor pushing his or her political views on me. Usually, they avoid political discussions that involve “liberal” and “conservative” viewpoints like the plague. From conversations with other people, this seems to be fairly consistent at my school. I’m not denying that some professors may push their own views, but I think that many new college students misunderstand a professor saying “your statement is not logically consistent” with “I hate you because you’re conservative or liberal”. For most professors, they approach their teaching from the standpoint of their discipline, from a rational and logical system developed over hundreds of years, not from silly political standpoints of the day. </p>
<p>Again, many college students are shocked that what holds up as discourse in the political realm, doesn’t hold up in the academic world. They think that every issue has to be approached from a conservative or liberal standpoint. Rather, the professor approaches the question from their own discipline standpoints, based on logic and reason. In my experience, most students are shocked that the professor doesn’t accept their standpoint, which was formulated for them by their parents, or media outlet, or spiritual advisor. The opinion is not rejected because it is conservative or liberal, it is rejected because it doesn’t hold up to logic, reason, and the approaches of the discipline that the professor comes from. </p>
<p>What many people don’t understand, is that most of academia operates outside of the plane of politics: Professors look at the problem from the point of view of their discipline. Historians, Classicists, and Sociologists can all look at the same problem from a different point of view, using different approaches. </p>
<p>In short: before someone calls a professor politically biased, they should first ask whether the professor is merely approaching the question from outside modern political discourse. Most political rhetoric and arguments are simply invalidated when they are used in the academic realm, which is a source of frustration for many students.</p>
<p>double post</p>
<p>Have you looked at Babson?</p>
<p>rumor has it that Babson student body is very cut throat</p>
<p>northeastern may be perfect, it’s business program is well regarded. most LAC’s do not have a business major, just economics.</p>
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<p>Your post is well-articulated and I agree in general that there are a lot of cases of alleged political bias by a professor that originate in a lack of rigor in the student’s own arguments. However, this is not always the case.<br>
I’ve never personally encountered this (though I went to MIT, not an LAC or ivy,) but certainly I’ve heard stories of professors who sounded like Keith Olbermann.</p>
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<p>My son and his cousin read a goodly portion of that book to us while driving around this summer. The right wing Christian bias in virtually all of its evaluations had them both in stitches. They were able to accurately predict how it would rate almost any school. Women’s college? Bad. Acknowledges the legitimacy of any religion other than Christianity? Bad. Has any black studies courses? Bad. And so on.</p>
<p>It certainly is “interesting.” Personally, I’m impatient with ideologues of any stripe.</p>
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<p>Here is a snippet of an interview with Steve Pinker:</p>
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<p>Do you disagree with his statement?</p>
<p>The whole interview is here:
[The</a> Harvard Crimson :: News :: PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505366]The”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505366)</p>
<p>Feel free to pick him apart.</p>
<p>“Most professors would welcome an articulate, empassioned conservative foil in the classroom. The right kind of student could have a lot of fun with that.”</p>
<p>Interesteddad: Imho this is a very interesting and important point and I am aware of several outgoing, argument loving, debate savvy extremely conservative students at extremely liberal schools making themselves local celebrities and it was all good for them… so far as I could tell. All the outward signs of success were definitely there and they seem to mostly go on to top law schools. They worked the liberal environment to their advantage. This was exactly the right fit for those particular conservatives.</p>
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<p>Maybe because a gay kid shouldn’t go to a place where he or she is officially considered to be a lesser form of human, condemned to burn in hell? Kinda like that? </p>
<p>A bit different from simple politics.</p>
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You mean like being called a Nazi for supporting the GWOT, being equated with a holocaust denier for discussing the other side of “man-made climate change” (referred to as “global warming” before the current winter, no? :D), or having people spit at you and call you a baby-killer when you show up to school in your ROTC uniform? Oh, wait – maybe you mean having your professor call you a “fascist ■■■■■■■” and refuse to give you a grade for your speech on faith and the definition of marriage?
… I guess that’s just simple politics?</p>
<p>Collegealum:</p>
<p>I am not going to revisit the Summers controversy. But I stand by my statement that Pinker was a Summers ally. He got to Harvard shortly before the brouhaha, having been heavily courted by Summers and after Summers had already alienated many on the Harvard faculty over issues other than the statement about women. Some of the people he alienated were far to the right of Summers politically, by the way. </p>
<p>Oh, and the person who precipitated the whole thing? She’s an MIT prof, not a Harvard one.</p>
<p>I did my undergrad work at a university that was a recruiting oasis for the FBI. I couldn’t stand those right wing nuts. I didn’t know the school was like that before I arrived, or I might not have arrived, and a scholarship is hard to walk away from. If I had to do it again, and money was not a factor, I’d go to the most liberal elite college i could find. There is something seriously twisted about right wingers. Something very facist about them.</p>
<p>Anyway, the OP should send her son someplace where he’ll fit in. Sacrificing him to make a point or so he can be hated doesn’t make sense and would be disservice to her/his own kid. </p>
<p>I expect my D to either go for the money (like father, like daughter) or go with a better class of people—someplace very liberal. Brown, Wesleyan or Oberlin would do just fine. Swarthmore even better, but I don’t think she’ll get in.</p>
<p>If you’re going to go to school with fascists, do it cause you’re getting a full merit ride. Then you can laugh at them. They fit in but have to pay through the nose while you’re graduating without debt. Sweet irony.</p>
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<p>What, precisely, is the “global war on terror”? Is “terror” a country? </p>
<p>I know plenty of people who, just as an example, fully supported going into Afghanistan after the Taliban and AL Qaeda since they attacked us but who rejected the invasion of Iraq as unjustified and likely to increase terrorism, not decrease it. Do they support the “global war on terror” in your view?</p>
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<p>In what way does one’s opinion on global warming, yea or nay, equate to something as innate to one’s being as one’s sexuality?</p>
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<p>Or having people spit on you and call you a baby killer when you go to Planned Parenthood for an ob/gyn appointment? Or better yet shoot you or bomb you?</p>
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<p>Any professor who calls a student such a name and behaves in such a way ought to be fired. (Of course, the reverse would not be true if the student gave a speech on reproductive choice and the school is Wheaton, hmmm?)</p>
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<p>Obviously not. But even someone like you ought to be able to acknowledge that there is a difference between political opinions, which are a matter of personal choice, and prejudices that strike at the very heart of who a person is.</p>
<p>I think there are intolerant profs on both the right and the left. But I also think that students are more likely to intimidate someone who holds minority views, especially on hot-button topics. A good prof ought to be able and willing to moderate discussions through letting divergent views be expressed with courtesy and thoughtfulness.</p>
<p>I still think that a student who is pretty conservative may not be comfortable at many LACs. Wesleyan, for example, has students who can be pretty in-your-face about their beliefs, whether it is about gender or vegetarianism (see the movie PCU). A student who holds strong views about drinking will not be happy at a number of schools (both LACS and large unis). </p>
<p>Holy Cross is a good college. Most of its students are Catholic, though I don’t know how it’s reflected in the curriculum, if at all. Someone who has taught there told me recently that many students drink heavily on weekends.</p>