Teaching Politics and Political Bias

Teaching Politics can be a dangerous business. Some individual academics have been accused of distortion and political bias by their students and have found themselves the subject of internal investigations and inquiry (Losco and De Ollos, 2007). Universities have had to defend themselves against claims of departments teaching ‘propaganda’ in class (Herring, 2008; Newman, 2008). This has now become something of an international phenomenon with accusations and rebuttals regarding political biases featuring regularly in the news. For example, a diplomatic cable written by a US Embassy official and later released by Wikileaks claimed that Canadian universities displayed tendencies of ‘anti- American’ bias (REF). US academia, en masse , has been accused of having overtly liberal and left wing tendencies which could create a cold house for conservative- minded faculties and students alike (Horowitz, 2007). Small scale and case study based research to test such claims have found to the contrary (La Falce and Gomez, 2007). Nonetheless, students in the US have been offered money to record their ‘liberal’ lecturers so that they and their alleged liberal biases can be exposed (Younge, 2006) and a similar story can be found in Australia, where the allegations of liberal biases in the universities eventually led to a full Senate Inquiry into Academic Freedom in 2008 (Gelber, 2009). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.