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Post Number: 1421
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, May 21, 2006 - 10:50 pm: | 
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http://www.unr.edu/nevadanews/nindetail.aspx?id=139
Study Casts Doubt on Claims That Conservative Students Face
Discrimination in Classes
By JENNIFER JACOBSON
CHE - Thursday, March 30, 2006
A study showing that conservative and liberal students do
equally well in courses with politically charged content casts
doubt on conservative activists' claims that liberal faculty
members routinely discriminate against their conservative
students.
The study found no difference in the grades conservative and
liberal students receive in sociology, cultural anthropology, and
women's-studies courses. It also found that conservative
students tend to earn higher grades than their liberal
classmates in business and economics courses.
Titled "What's in a Grade? Academic Success and Political
Orientation," the study was conducted by Markus Kemmelmeier,
an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada
at Reno, who was the lead author; Cherry Danielson, a
research fellow at Wabash College; and Jay Basten, a lecturer
in kinesiology at the University of Michigan.
The researchers published their paper in the Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin last October, but it has attracted little
attention, even as activists like David Horowitz continue to
press state legislatures to adopt a so-called academic bill of
rights to make college campuses more "intellectually diverse"
and more tolerant of conservatives.
Mr. Kemmelmeier's study follows two others, published within
the past seven years, that found that conservative students
tended to earn slightly lower grades in majors such as sociology
and anthropology. The professor, who describes his politics as
slightly left of center, says he did not undertake the study to
contribute to the ongoing discussion of political bias on college
campuses, but to address ongoing questions in social
psychology about the choices people make regarding their
interaction with organizations and what personal characteristics
contribute to their success within those organizations.
The earlier studies are "consistent with what Horowitz might
suggest -- that conservative students are actually not doing all
that well in fields that are thought more left-leaning," says Mr.
Kemmelmeier. But there's a problem with that argument, he
says: The students' performance "has nothing to do with bias"
on the part of their professors.
In a four-year longitudinal study that began in the late 1990s,
he surveyed 3,890 students at a major public university in the
Midwest. Asked to describe their political orientation, 2.7
percent identified themselves as far left, 34.6 percent as liberal,
42 percent as middle of the road, 20 percent as conservative,
and 1.2 percent as far right.
Mr. Kemmelmeier then compared the transcripts of a variety of
students taking the same courses, specifically courses taught in
the economics department and the business school (which Mr.
Kemmelmeier considered "hierarchy-enhancing," or
conservative) and those taught in American culture, African-
American studies, cultural anthropology, education, nursing,
sociology, and women's studies (which he
considered "hierarchy-attenuating," or liberal).
He found that in the latter courses, students' political
orientations had no effect on their grades -- which, the study
says, suggests that disciplines such as sociology and
anthropology "might be more accepting of a broad range of
student perspectives," while economics and business
classes "appear to be more sensitive to whether student
perspectives are compatible with those of the academic
discipline."
In economics and business classes, the study found,
conservative students earned better grades. It also found that
conservative students were likely to graduate with higher GPA's
in those courses than liberal students who entered college with
similar SAT scores.
According to the study, conservative students might have an
advantage over their peers in such courses because the
conservative students might view the courses as more relevant
to their future careers and therefore might be motivated to
work harder.
Also, the study notes, conservative students might be "more
comfortable" with such subjects "because making money is
more likely to be a personal goal for them than for liberal
students." Moreover, in economics and business
courses, "teaching methods and classroom structure might be
more amenable to conservative than liberal students, for
example, by emphasizing competition over cooperation."
But the study's authors say that liberal students are unlikely to
face discrimination from conservative faculty members in such
courses. To discriminate against liberal students, professors
would need to know the political views of individual students in
what are typically large classes; it's unlikely that professors
would know their students that well, Mr. Kemmelmeier says. He
adds that many professors who teach big courses don't grade
their students' papers themselves -- teaching assistants do. |
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