Editorial: On liberal bias and a leap of faith

Universities, as a group, get a bad rap for promoting a liberal bias, and a lot of people, including a few from our own community, are asking ‘why’. It could be that the university community is more prone to public protest. It could also be that a false reputation has persisted from those hippies that emerged from the Cold War cloud, insisting on questioning the established order. Maybe each generation is just bound to battle with the precedents and patterns of the generation before. Perhaps it is our professors that foster that liberal bias, abusing their status in the lecture hall to – horror of horrors! – express themselves.

First thing’s first: Thinking critically about the education we receive in the classroom is an important part of the university experience. Second thing: just because you are asking questions doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. I often hear my peers complaining about an anti-American bias in the history department; an environmental activist’s point of view in the science department; and a socialist agenda in their sociology class. “Why do we put up with this?” some ask, or: “Why do they push their personal agenda?” and: “Why do they refuse to take a balanced approach?”

Quite often, the people who argue for a balanced approach already understand the culturally accepted arguments. They understand, for instance, that the war in Vietnam was presented as a moral victory, and that soldiers were treated poorly when they arrived home. When a professor suggests that it was a violent, wasteful war, it was immoral, and the soldiers did horrible things to the Vietnamese, students cry for balance. Is it possible that instead of demanding both sides, students should realize that they already have position A in their intellectual toolbox? Is it possible that a balanced approach is not as useful as a balancing approach, which compensates for our cultural narrative? Perhaps students that lack position A are asleep at the wheel as citizens. Maybe they aren’t engaging the university experience correctly, and are just expecting to be fed.

Think about it this way: the professors that are accused of being unbalanced are the kind of people that have devoted their lives to studying these topics. They have a pretty good understanding of the failures of the past – racism giving way to poverty; broken promises at Kyoto; social programs that fail good citizens and reward laziness – and yet, they are convinced that doing the right thing is possible! They have the stones to teach students that, and they try to push through a Sunday school approach that is based on human wisdom, rather than godly foolishness. Remember, these are the high-caliber professionals that bike to work; that donate endlessly to social programs; and that, ultimately, sacrifice well-deserved salary to teach at this diverse institution.

That, to me, is an act of faith. Too often, we think of faith as being sure of something that we cannot see – in other words, believing that something real is hidden across the gap, in the fog. We run into problems when we are too sure; when we focus too hard on what that thing might be, and think we have it figured out. We need to have a different point of view. Faith is very much an act; it is looking into the fog, leaping, and being caught by something that we couldn’t see before, that we couldn’t have imagined, no matter how well we reasoned. Faith is letting go of your preconceived ideas, falling into something new, and seeing the truth and the falsehood in what you thought was wisdom.

The point is this: Redeemer claims to enable us to form a worldview. Whether they succeed in that or not depends us, the students. Instead of complaining about receiving a lopsided approach, maybe students should think for themselves for once. Instead of expecting both sides of the story, students should think about how they would complete the whole. There’s something a little bit backwards about the idea of a student coming to a liberal arts university to piece together a working worldview, and yet is expecting to be fed a neutral diet from their professors. That would be like trying to get the colour blue out of grey. Instead, a responsible student will consider the approaches of their colourful professors, and try to piece together what will hopefully end up looking like a whole.

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