Governor Walker’s Son on Political Bias at Marquette

Matt Walker, son of Governor Scott Walker and a Marquette student, gave a fairly lengthy interview to Brietbart.com, and talked about his experiences at Marquette.

Two key issues where how he has been treated as the son of a governor whom most faculty voted against, and how much ideological bias he has encountered in his classes. Quoting the article:

“It always comes down to the professor in the end,” he said when asked if he’s treated fairly.

But one of the most surprising themes of my experience in college has been that political bias appears less in my political courses (as a political science and economics double major), but more so in classes like English, Philosophy, and other humanities.

In the beginning years of my time at Marquette, I don’t think most professors knew who I was. I don’t think too many professors treat me differently when they find out, but every now and then I’ll have a minor issue.

He said that conservatives and Republicans on college campuses who are aiming to fight back against liberal bias by leftist professors and academia figures should work to create bias reporting systems to expose any double standards they face.

This is consistent with our experience, and indeed with a lot of data on ideological bias in academia. Intolerant political correctness is most common in the humanities, and in some social sciences, especially sociology and some subfields in psychology. It’s less common in political science and much less common in economics.

Marquette’s Political Science Department, for example, leans heavily liberal, but there are conservative voices (including ours, which Marquette is trying to shut up), but most of what our liberal colleagues preach is “disciplinal:” more concerned with the theoretical constructs of political science than with raw liberal or conservative politics.

The humanities are very different, and several fiascoes in Marquette’s Philosophy Department are just the tip of the iceberg.

Humanities faculty, lacking any disciplined view of politics, simply give vent to their biases.

With this in mind, the recent move by Dean Rick Holz to water down the Arts & Sciences core curriculum may be a good thing. Students will be more free to pursue the subjects they want, with less burden of politically correct indoctrination in Marquette’s humanities departments.

But in any real “Catholic university” there would be a robust humanities requirement, and it would not consist of politically correct indoctrination.