Tuesday, May 08, 2007

College professors are mysteriously hostile towards fundamentalists

Why on earth would this be so? Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire quotes The Washington Post:
Tobin asked professors at all kinds of colleges -- public and private, secular and religious, two-year and four-year -- to rate their feelings toward various religious groups, from very warm or favorable to very cool or unfavorable. He said he designed the question primarily to gauge anti-Semitism but found that professors expressed positive feelings toward Jews, Buddhists, Roman Catholics and most other religious groups.

The only groups that elicited highly negative responses were evangelical Christians and Mormons.
Molly Ivors notes:
Nelson's point, that evangelicals oppose scientific and other forms of rational reasoning, is pretty indisputable, and likely to piss off those who dedicate their lives to serious study. But it's passed over quickly in the WaPo. Scholarship and intellectual inquiry--and the important pedagogical technique of pushing students past their comfort zone--are seen here as some wacky form of political correctness, some bizarre academic habit, like wearing hoods and beanies, running mandated national searches for positions for which there is an ample local talent pool, and unionizing.
Those weird zany ivory tower education guys! Just goes to show you how overly edjamicated we are and all the schooling we need is high school....

2 comments:

Steve Bates said...

"Jews, Buddhists, Roman Catholics and most other religious groups" don't typically target university professors for harassment and/or firing. Anti-intellectualism becomes personal when one confronts certain types of evangelicals... there's no mystery here at all. There's also no mystery why evangelical academics tend mostly to concentrate and aggregate in places like Regent.

I, as a non-Catholic, served for years on the adjunct music faculty of a local Catholic university. Not once did I feel that my legitimate academic freedom was infringed. My students were capable of assertive, well-reasoned arguments about musical and musicological matters; I was challenged to meet their arguments. No one ever suggested that it was a problem that I am a UU... nor did I ever once have to apologize for my intellectual approach to teaching musical performance.

Yes, this is about certain groups of evangelical Christians, by no means all evangelical Christians and certainly not all Christians. And based on what we're learning about Monica Goodling (aka The Tin Boob Nemesis, as we've recently learned), there is legitimate reason for concern by faculty members at less radical institutions.

ellroon said...

Boy, Steve, you really have been about! Nice to hear your experiences were good in the Catholic university. (My husband could tell you stories of his days in a Catholic high school with the crazed nuns....)

I really don't think the fundies see themselves as being rude or challenging when they denigrate science or tell people they are going to hell. They think they are doing what they're supposed to.

They have no self-awareness.