It is great to see Anne’s post regarding ACTA’s recent study. It is common for defenders of the academic establishment to respond, “prove it” to claims that the academy is wildly out of the mainstream. To those of us who have spent any time behind the ivy-covered walls, these denials are ridiculous. It’s like being asked to “prove” the sky is blue. Yet is is discouraging to see that many legislators and citizens take the establishment’s denials at face value, and so we all must do the work of proving the obvious.
Over the last four years, a series of studies have begun to leave the academic world with nowhere to hide. FIRE has shown that speech codes are the rule rather than the exception on campus, numerous studies (Students for Academic Freedom has compiled several) show that faculties are overwhelmingly leftist, ACTA has demonstrated that teachers commonly interject their politics into the classroom. And now we see that ideology is infecting even the most basic course materials.
While I have no doubt that campus radicals will soon busy themselves attacking a study that they know to be true, ACTA has done us all a service by driving one more nail in the coffin of the academic left’s public credibility.