Study: College Kids Who Detect Bias in Class Are Mostly Dumb
Are you a college student who frequently detects political bias of one sort or another in your professors? Chances are, you're dumb.
A new study at an anonymous Southern university compared students' own level of resistance to personal and political change with their perceptions of how biased their teachers are. Surprise: correlation!
The study found that students — even in the same classrooms — didn't perceive bias in the same ways (or at all), and those who perceived bias were those who were resistant to changing any of their views. The finding extended to some who identified themselves as being far on the left and resistant to change, and who believed that they had some biased conservative professors. But among both left-leaning and right-leaning students who didn't score high on resistance to new ideas, there was little perception of bias.
To clarify this, for the dumb students who will, with any luck, compose outraged emails to us after being forwarded this post: while the research accompanying this study "found no evidence of real bias," it did find that kids who are very resistant to change thought their professors were biased, because the professor, perhaps, challenged the student's views. Since the student is paying money to the professor to teach the student with the implicit understanding that the student knows far less than the professor about the subject at hand, these findings indicate that the students in question—who mistake the educational process for "bias"—are dumb.
But I bet the study's authors were liberals.
