Jon Shields at The Washington Monthly:
A deeper problem than the campus climate, I suspect, is the curriculum itself, particularly in humanistic fields outside of economics and political science. I fear that the courses in many such disciplines are closing, particularly around the topics that most divide us.
That’s why, in collaboration with some colleagues at the Claremont Colleges, I tapped a database with millions of college syllabi to assess the extent to which issues like racial inequality, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught in ways that expose students to broad scholarly disagreements over those issues.
Our findings are concerning. For example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is often assigned to college undergraduates—as it should be, given its scholarly and political influence. However, her most prominent and serious academic critics—none of whom, I might add, consider themselves to be conservatives—are rarely assigned alongside it. These include James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and my colleague Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, published by Harvard University Press and selected as an “Editors’ Choice” by TheNew York Times. Our results show that, since their publication, Forman’s and Fortner’s groundbreaking books have been assigned roughly 3.5 percent and 1.5 percent of the time, respectively, alongside The New Jim Crow. What is missing, it seems, is a whole spectrum of non-radical perspectives. And that, we suspect, encourages an essentially Manichaean mind-set in students, one that oversimplifies the problems they will one day inherit.