Letter to Sarah Lawrence College President Cristle Collins Judd in Support of Prof. Samuel Abrams

Dear President Judd:

I attended Sarah Lawrence College for two years, from 1973 to 1975, and I am increasingly ashamed of my association with it.  I read with dismay Professor Abrams’s op-ed in Minding the Campus.  Abrams writes that students are afraid to say not only that they support a Republican or Libertarian candidate but also that they support a left-wing candidate like Hillary Clinton who is not as extreme a leftist as campus bullies would like.  

When Professor Abrams wrote in the Times that the college needs better balance, he and his family received threats and suffered property damage from campus bigots who have been encouraged by a faculty that has apparently lost its way and an administration that apparently likes to run afoul of Section 501(c)(3).  My guess is that if a basic history examination is to be given to the Orwellian-named “Diaspora Coalition,” it would reveal that the majority do not know the basics of history.  Professor Abrams says that this coalition of bigots has intimidated and bullied those who support him.

I want to see such an examination given to the members of the Diaspora Coalition. The scores should be publicly posted.  My null hypothesis is that they are badly educated half literates. 

My question is this: Given that the college increasingly appears to be in the indoctrinating-and-dumbing-down business, exactly why should I offer financial support?

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Education Increases Ideological Prejudice

Sean Stevens of Heterodox Academy has written a summary of  a study, which appears in the December 2017 (81:4) issue of Public Opinion Quarterly,  by PJ Henry and Jaime Napier of NYU.  The study finds that while education reduces ethnic, racial, and anti-immigrant prejudice, it increases ideological prejudice.  Stevens suggests that the results require rethinking about why education reduces prejudice in some areas but increases it in others.

The study is based on data in the American National Elections Studies survey. The authors study a 40-year period, from 1972 to 2012.  Henry and Napier base the study on self-reports of ideology and measures of feelings toward people with left- and right-wing ideologies.  They find that education is weakly associated with left orientation, and the effect comes mostly from college graduation.  In other words, people who are able to see through four years of college tend to be more left oriented, either because they are better able to stand the environment or because they learn to be left oriented in college.

Increased education is found to correlate with increased ideological prejudice for both left and right, but the effect is stronger for leftists. When the authors control for time, they find that the effect has significantly increased over time for leftists but not for conservatives.

Stevens notes that the results call into question the notion that education promotes tolerance toward those who are different.  Rather, it seems to promote certain patterns of tolerance in specific areas, often called politically correct.  In other areas, which are not within the rote, left-wing, politically correct catechism, education does not improve tolerance of others' beliefs.