As a religion and biology major at Wake Forest, John, a senior, chose to take part in the University’s rich tradition of liberal arts. John asked not to be identified because he is still taking classes in the departments we discussed. Along the way, he has taken classes about ecology and evolution, developing secular theories about religion, and the sociology of race in the United States.
Within each of these classes, John had to make a choice: share his dissenting, more conservative opinions and deal with the potential costs or stay silent due to the perceived bias of his professors.
According to the 50 participants of a recent Wake Forest Review survey, conservative students are frequently faced with the decision and often chose to stay silent. 83.7 percent of respondents said they have had a professor who they felt was biased against conservatives.
Of those who said they had a biased professor, 80 percent said they held back from participating in class or did not answer questions due to potential academic or social consequences of participation.
The survey was not scientific but did receive a response from a broad swath of conservative students at the school. The results of this survey at least indicate that there should be further research that can help eliminate potential response biases. Further of analysis of the results also showed a serious trend.
An analysis of each of the departments mentioned by respondents found that there is a strong and statistically significant correlation between the number of times a department was mentioned as biased by conservative students and the proportion of right-leaning professors in the department.
So, the correlation indicated that the fewer right-leaning professors in a department, the more likely conservative students perceived a department as biased.
However, the proportion of left-leaning professors in a department was not correlated to mentions of bias. You can see the analysis .
However, not all conservative students see the bias of liberal professors as a problem.
“Certainly if a professor grades negatively for political views and there is evidence of that, it should be brought up to the administration and certainly a majority of professors are liberal,” said junior Daniel Ross. “A conclusion that because professors lean left, conservatives have it tough on the Wake Forest campus is a stretch.”
Survey respondents were also asked to give their reasons for not participating in class.
35.5% of these students said they held back because they believed participating would hurt their grade.
35.5% said they held back because they believed participating would hurt their relationship with the professor.
29% said they held back because participating would have caused me to be “ganged up on” by their classmates, and the professor wouldn’t have helped direct the dialogue.
“Every single other person around me started making comments about me being white, male, born in America, and going to Wake Forest,” he said. “It was definitely trying to silence the voice of dissent. A lot of these people are big about expressing their own truth, if I was going to express my truth in this situation, my point of view would not have been welcome.”
During John’s time at Wake Forest, he faced each of these scenarios in different classes across academic disciplines.
For example, an essay question in the final exam for an ecology and evolution class proposed a scenario where the student has a friend who is “a little bit suspicious of climate change and whether government policies can do anything to reduce it.” The question then asked students explain why your friend is wrong.
“The point of the question was to debunk more of a political stance, rather than any scientific one,” John said. “The nature of the question wasn’t to explain how something works or how some process works, but rather to silence climate skeptics.”
Based on the stakes of the question, John chose to give the answer he believed the professor wanted. “If I was a climate skeptic myself and gave an honest answer, it would have hurt my grade,” he said. “It was a final exam.”
In a sociology class, John had a professor who said that “white people inherently have to be racist because they are in a position of power in society.” This time, he chose to speak up.
“There were times that I gently pushed back against it, in favor of some more individual traits – like look at people based on their personalities rather than the color of their skin,” he said. “The entire classroom around me started raising their hand, saying things like you’re a white man, you don’t know what it’s like to be a trans-woman of color.”
The barrage of comments, which John characterized as ad hominem and strawman attacks, did not end there.
“Every single other person around me started making comments about me being white, male, born in America, and going to Wake Forest,” he said. “It was definitely trying to silence the voice of dissent. A lot of these people are big about expressing their own truth, if I was going to express my truth in this situation, my point of view would not have been welcome.”
The professor of the class, who John hoped would reorient the discussion to evidence-based arguments, instead said that “the worst thing about racism is that it can make good people believe evil things.” John believed that this comment was directed at him and his beliefs.
John’s experiences show the calculus that conservative students go through regarding the costs they are willing to bear in a class. In these examples, John was willing to endure the social costs of facing critical comments from classmates and a professor, but not willing to face the academic cost of answering an exam question honestly.
This calculus is different for different students. For example, women as a population tend to be more agreeable than men, which would cause them to take social costs from participating in class more seriously.
In a statement to the Review, Dean of the College Michelle Gillespie emphasized the University’s commitment to providing “powerful learning opportunities that challenge all students to develop open minds and think critically.”
She pointed to the mission statement of the undergraduate college, which says,“It seeks to encourage habits of mind that ask “why,” that evaluate evidence, that are open to new ideas, that attempt to understand and appreciate the perspectives of others, that accept complexity and grapple with it, that admit error, and that pursue truth.”
If students feel that professors are not following these values, Gillespie said that they should share their concerns in mid-term and end of the semester course evaluations for a class.
According to John, one professor in the Religion department, Jarrod Whitaker, told John’s class that bias reports filed against him would not be taken seriously by the University.
John said that while the class focused on secular models of religion and evaluated theories of religion and why people were religious, Whitaker would constantly “explain why Christian theology is problematic, racist, sexist, imperialist, and fundamentally evil.” He did not make similar comments about any other religions.
“His point was specifically that Christianity is in a position of power, everything came down to who is in a position of power and how we can problematize that,” John said. “If you try to challenge him, he will absolutely dominate you. Even to women who argued with him, he told them that even if you don’t know you’re being oppressed, the systems we can clearly see show us a patriarchy.”
After a class where Whitaker asserted that the Virgin Mary must have “got laid,” John, who is a devout Catholic, met with him after class for several hours to discuss his comments. Whitaker became “so heated when I made counter-arguments that another professor came in to make sure everything was alright.”
“His position was that it was not only illogical to believe in God, he said that to believe in God is one of the most immoral things you can do, and to believe there is an objective Truth is the most tremendous evil that is responsible for all the great suffering in the world,” John said.
“If, as you imply, one or more of my students is experiencing distress in my classes, then I accept responsibility because no student should feel threatened in any university class,” Whitaker said when asked about potential bias in class. “On the other hand, sometimes when we investigate our own beliefs and interpretations, even in the safe environment of a university, it can be personally upsetting, simply as a matter of critical inquiry.”
“As a professional teacher, I am fully aware of this and consequently take extra pains to walk my students through the methods and theories academics use to contextualize any religious tradition’s truth claims or historical practices,” Whitaker said. “In addition, I personally favor no tradition above any other yet at all times reaffirm my students’ religious convictions, while asking them to think through their own beliefs with a critical, analytical, and self-reflexive perspective.”
“If individual students are encouraged to thoroughly explore, revisit, and defend their ideas, that’s higher education at its best,” Provost Rogan Kersh said in a statement to the Review. “Of course, if faculty are impugning students in their classroom as a group–whether conservatives, LGBT students, Muslims, Latinas, or any other group–then I would hope that students report the behavior through any number of means available to them.
