If You Look For Bias, You'll Always Find It
I’ve been teaching Canadian politics for a while. When I started in 2000, the biggest story in Ottawa was the civil war within the Liberal Party between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.
One day, a student came up to me after a lecture and said, “Professor, I figured out that you’re a Paul Martin supporter.” I asked him why he thought that.
“Well, I’ve noticed in the lectures that you’ve said critical things about “the Canadian Alliance,” [look it up, kids] “the Progressive Conservatives,” “the NDP,” and “the Bloc.” But you always refer to “the Chrétien government,” not “the Liberals.”
“So,” he concluded, “you must be a Liberal, but on the Paul Martin side of the party.”
I thanked him for his observation and made sure to blast Paul Martin in my next lecture.
I’ve always remembered that encounter because it illustrates a fundamental tenet: you can always find bias if you’re looking for it. The student set up certain parameters, and I slid right into them.
“Classroom bias” is a perennial complaint. In the 1990s my late departmental colleague Peter Emberley wrote a lively book called Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada’s Universities. Peter blamed different sides for pushing universities to the brink, overloading institutions with their own expectations and then finding bias and fault everywhere based on those expectations. The book reads awkwardly today, as he framed the opposing forces narrowly as “the cultural left” and “the corporate right.” But his basic point - that universities are getting it from both sides - rings true today. Critics are quick to look for bias, and gosh darn it, when they look for it they always find it.
A common fallacy is to assume that everyone with who you disagree…agrees with each other. This has gotten particularly toxic in American politics, where the political right paints a giant woke conspiracy in which the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, and the Democratic party are all of one mind and in on it together. But it’s also on the left, where “neoliberal” serves for some as a catch-all phrase for pretty much anything that suggests someone has to pay the bill. If you assume your various opponents are all in cahoots with each other, it vastly increases your chance of finding bias against your own lonely valiant viewpoint.
The more immersed someone is in a particular ideology or partisan identity, the more they can’t step out of it even briefly. Another classroom example: a few years ago I had former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps come give a talk. I chatted afterward with Ms. Copps, in which she seemed to be trying to figure out what I was: i.e., what party I supported. Ms. Copps, possibly the most diehard Liberal ever, appeared to struggle to understand how someone could teach politics without a clear partisan identity. (If I misinterpreted our conversation, I apologize to Ms. Copps.)
(On the other hand, some dump on political scientists for not being political enough - that we’re just ivory tower types who know nothing of the real world of politics and have never knocked on a door; so perhaps we’re not biased enough. I have knocked on doors, but the last political campaign I participated in was in 1997, after which I decided it was best for my career to begin winding up any partisan ties. I miss campaigning.)
Surveys regularly find that the vast majority of American academics vote Democrat; I know of no polls in Canada, but I’ll readily concede most Canadian faculty, at least on the Arts side of the university, vote Liberal or New Democrat, and perhaps Green for variety.
But who you vote for doesn’t necessarily mean you’re incapable of understanding other points of view. Again, the more ideological one is themselves, the harder it is for them to grasp this point. A competent university instructor works hard to expose students to different perspectives and interpretations, and though the Republican Party utterly fails to comprehend this, exposure is not indoctrination. If an instructor is indeed “indoctrinating” students with a particular point of view, that’s not necessarily bias; it’s just bad teaching.
Admittedly, not all academics can easily detach themselves, and I’m not going to blindly defend us all as being perfectly disinterested open minds. But I will defend my profession from those who are just itching to find rampant bias everywhere.
Academics are imperfect, like everyone else, and sometimes we say and do clumsy things that exclude or denigrate certain points of view on the political spectrum. So call us on that. Tell us we’re wrong and what we’ve missed. But don’t jump to ‘bias’ and dismiss us. Help us improve.
Academia is ultimately about the development and exchange of ideas, and the vast majority of us want to engage, not shill. A while ago, back when Erin O’Toole led the Conservative Party, I wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail [paywalled] about how the Conservatives had missed many opportunities to engage with academics because they took such a stark friend-or-enemy approach to the sector. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased to get a personal response from Mr O’Toole, nicely undermining my rant.
That’s what I’m talking about - respond, engage, debate. That’s what academics do. Don’t just denigrate and dismiss and write us off because we say things you don’t like. But - and this applies to all the major parties - there’s far too little of that, and it only seems to be getting worse. In a polarized political environment, everyone is pressured to take a side, and to stand firm against all the supposedly conjoined enemies out there. And if you look for bias with that mentality, you’ll always find it.