The Relationship Between Higher Education and Liberalism

There is a philosophical conversation that is prominent in present-day America re: liberalism and its strong correlation to higher education.  In particular, do universities manufacture liberals, or are better educated people naturally liberal in their belief systems?

My mom and I are talking about Laurence Tribe, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law (pictured).  He’s a distinguished legal scholar, brilliant individual, frequently interviewed in mainstream media. I would put him in the same class as Noam Chomsky, insofar as they both live at the very top of the intellectual, and both extremely progressive.

Yet as far as the right-wing TV “news” shows are concerned, neither of these two people exist. And, to be sure, Fox News and the like take the position that college life is tantamount to brainwashing, insofar as professors are prone to punish their students with conservative viewpoints. How that could possibly operate in math, science, language, music — anything outside of political science and perhaps history — I have no clue.

I guess it’s one of those many things in life that are impossible to prove one way or the other.  We all suffer from our cognitive biases, seeking data points that confirm what we already believe.

Moreover, we need to keep in mind that, in a capitalist society, there will always be a supply that rises to meet a demand.

This is really what Fox News is all about.  Almost half of American voters are Republicans, and today, that means taking some fairly extreme positions on things like Trump’s honesty, Biden’s senility,  abortion, gun rights, and so forth.  Fox makes a fortune with programming that appeals to these people, many of them turn Fox on when they get up in the morning and fall asleep to it at night.  That’s a lot of eyeballs being sold products like My Pillow, walk-in bathtubs, hearing aids, and food supplements.