The Real Problem in Higher Education

"The National Association of Scholars is investigating whether liberal professors are disproportionately assigning liberal texts in their classes," reports Daniel McCarthy, suggesting the "project smacks of nothing so much as attempts of left-wing grievance groups to show that there’s a bias in the canon against blacks, women, and homosexuals" — How Not to Fix Higher Education. He concludes, "Putting serious thinkers into crude categories and then demanding some ratio of every group be taught amounts to just another kind of political correctness."

In a follow-up post, he argues that "the bigger problem for conservatives and libertarians in higher education today is not political bias but methodology" — Methodenstreit. An example:

In economics, for example, while there are Keynesians who seek to impose their views upon everyone else, even many non-Keynesians would object to teaching Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, not for partisan reasons but because they consider the Austrian approach to economics to be unscientific. If economics is a science, what kind of a science is it? The Austrians say that it is a logical science proceeding from a priori concepts — it’s akin to mathematics. The dominant schools of non-Austrian economists construe their field as an empirical science.

He brilliantly concludes that "the battle is less between the Left and the Right than between positivists and non-positivists (or, more generally, between older, more humanistic or theoretical approaches and later scientific or pseudoscientific ones)."