University Union calls out leftist fixation in UMass academics
‘Professors often preach their anti-American judgments to students as final ‘truths”
In keeping with UMass’ character, the UMass University Union is now petitioning for a wider spectrum of classes in order to address the narrow range of political thought currently consuming the campus.
According to the Union, students of many parties such as Republican and Democratic, as well as independent students, are signing the petition.
The Union feels as if the University tends to cater to one specific, leftist, field of thought. According to a piece published on Young America’s Foundation, and fleshed out on MassLive, a member of the Union stated, “Dissenters from Left-Liberal thought on campus are considered ignorant, intolerant, and uneducated.”
And according to the petition, “professors often preach their anti-American judgments to students as final ‘truths’ – such as the view that all major world problems, from poverty in Africa to ISIS, stem from American capitalism and imperialism.”
One of the things the Union has decided to focus on in their petition is the lack of religion courses offered by the University. They have even come up with a list of potential courses they are interested in seeing integrated as long as the school continues to refer to itself as a “comprehensive” university:
The petition asserts that there is a need for intellectual diversity. They claim, “Diversity at UMass, including race and ethnicity, must also mean intellectual diversity.” They are fighting for a more multiplex framing of our history, economic, moral, and political life.
The petition leaves the University with a list of suggestions: hire more faculty with expertise on religion, hire more faculty who provide perspectives within the conservative spectrum discussed above, encourage faculty to not indoctrinate students by teaching only one-sided intellectual ideology, provide training sessions to faculty on how to present controversial ideas in a framework of scholarly and intellectual debate rather than ideological indoctrination, and provide students with an administrative body to which they can complain about extreme ideological imbalance in the classroom.
On February 9th at 7pm in the Student Union Ballroom, there will be a debate with teams representing views of the Republican and the Democratic parties. According to MassLive, a UMass economics professor Gerald Friedman and a student from the UMass Democrats Club will represent democrats while Smith College economics professor Jim Miller and a student from the UMass Republican Club comprise the Republican team.