Few students succumb to political indoctrination – Study

Pundits and lawmakers in the United States sometimes accuse professors of being liberals who indoctrinate their students. The research says they are right on one of those points, not both. Faculty members’ political beliefs do run left, according to numerous studies. But, counter to what US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and others have alleged, even conservative students don’t generally feel pressured to think a certain way, writes Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed.

Preliminary data from a new study suggest that this dynamic might be changing, however – yet not for the reasons one might assume. Ten percent of students in this study, especially conservative ones, did report feeling pressured to align their thinking with their professors’ politics. Yet the authors say that this might be because the overall political environment is now so charged, not because professors are telling students what to think.

“There are so many different ways now that students are being cued to think politically, whereas maybe they weren’t before,” said co-author Matthew Mayhew, the William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher Professor of Educational Administration at Ohio State University. “If I’m a professor and I’m talking about health care, students in the room might be cued to think politically about it, but 20 years ago that wouldn’t necessarily have been the case.”
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site