Well, leave it to Fox News to write and publish a one-sided and biased story about speaker bias on college campuses. Fox News decides to quote the right-wing activist David Horowitz in a story about college campuses inviting more liberal than conservative speakers.
Here’s an excerpt from the Fox News story:
“The colleges have been transformed,” said Horowitz, whose organization, Students for Academic Freedom, tracks ideological bias on campus. “They’re now these partisan institutions. They’re not going to change.”
Horowitz ran a study in 2003 that looked at commencement speakers at 32 top institutions in the U.S. for the previous 10 years. He found that liberals and Democrats were favored over conservatives by a ratio of 15-1. And then he stopped counting.
“It’s permanent. It’s not going to change, partly because there’s so little attention being paid to it,” he told FOXNews.com.
Horowitz, however, can not be trusted (unless you’re from Fox News) to present an unbiased perspective on this issue (or, for that matter, many other issues he and his group are affiliated with). He has a significant credibility gap and, thus, anything he says is suspect.
That being said, however, I encourage different perspectives on college campuses in terms of lectures over the course of the academic school year. Students should have opportunities to hear speakers coming from reasonably different perspectives.
