Note the wording. Tritton doesn't say rightward approaches are wrong or faulty. Rather, they are not "serious," and unseriousness is the most damning judgment for a professor to make. It means that such work doesn't merit opposition, or even attention. Tritton doesn't need to introduce conservative or libertarian thinking about social justice at all. It's already in such poor condition that it doesn't pass the legitimacy test.
I've seen this in other arenas. There is the idea that public interest law is all liberal (ignoring, of course, jobs like prosecutorial work, aiding small businesses so that their first lawsuit doesn't cause them to go out of business, helping war veterans). There is also the idea that, for example, government is the only way to help those in need of help, so conservatives - who generally favour other mechanisms of social aid - do not care about the impoverished, sick, or disabled. (I heard, but cannot find a citation for, that conservatives give more money, aid, and even blood than liberals.)

Fun question for readers: Is there a connection to be made between the "soft bias" Bauerlein describes here and the "soft bigotry of low expectations"? If so, how would you frame it? If not, why not?
As a student, I would say that there is. I encounter many liberal professors - I'm a law student. When I've had to write papers, and chosen to take a conservative/libertarian approach, I see the bias (soft or not) as a challenge - I know that I have to be that much better to not be seen as misguided, wrong, or poorly prepared. (In many ways, it's no fun to write for an audience who agrees with me - there's no challenge.) In my world, soft bias (or any bias) correlates directly to higher expectations.

Soft bias sounds pretty good to me. As you know I favor taking conservatives out behind the football stadium and shooting them. If other teachers choose to legitimate my psychotic notions by making reasoned and purposeful decisions, good for them. With any luck conservatism can be stamped out altogether by Spring Break.

Soft bias is definitely an effect of which we need to be more cautious. At the same time, one begins to wonder if a college course can have *any* assumptions at all at its foundations without being accused of bias.

This is ironic, because so much of the critique of soft bias is a version of the anti-foundationalism of the very postmodernists the bias-critics accuse of bias. That is to say, it becomes too easy to point out every assumption to be a bias.

It's also ironic because the most un-biased -- because anti-assumption -- classroom I've experienced was a completely constructivist education course. We came in, and the professor said we had to put the course together, we had to assemble questions, we had to focus the course, and he'd provide only Socratic questioning guidance throughout.

I don't want to argue that there's no such thing as soft bias. Instead, we must be cautious to point fingers lest we find ourselves uprooting "bias" whenever a professor makes a guiding or foundational assumption. (We also must avoid falling into the Fox News idea of unbiased: that is, presenting two opposing biases as a form of unbiasedness.)

Matt (aka Luther) wrote:

We also must avoid falling into the Fox News idea of unbiased: that is, presenting two opposing biases as a form of unbiasedness.

I love your objectivity!

"We must avoid falling into the (name the demon) idea of unbiased . . ."

If presenting two opposing biases as a form of unbiasedness is the best you can do, it sure beats nothing.

Here's C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man talking about an elementary textbook.

Their words are that we 'appear to be saying something very important' when in reality we are 'only saying something about our own feelings'. No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of [the textbook authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.

Maybe the academics who do not realize their bias had textbooks such as these when they were young and those books did their work. Maybe less academic kids who were looking out the window and not paying such close attention to their studies ended up being more independent thinkers.

It's interesting that you posted this right now, Erin, because on the way home this evening I happened to remember some homework my daughter had in AP English back in high school. She had to answer some questions, she told me, about Blake's poem about the chimney sweep; specifically, whether she thought Blake was whitewashing the real horror of child labor in Victorian England.

"Which poem about the chimney sweep?" I said. "There are two, one in 'Songs of Innocence' and one in 'Songs of Experience'."

She didn't know anything about that; she only had one poem. I looked at her book - it was the poem from "Songs of Innocence" - and could not believe that they would pose that question without presenting Blake's other poem. But they had.

"You cannot answer that question without reading the other poem!" I said.

I found it on the internet, she read it, and instantly agreed with me that you could not answer that question about Blake without the other poem.

So what was the deal? Were the textbook writers too stupid to realize that Blake had two chimney sweep poems, and the importance of that fact? Or were they reinforcing the stereotype of the clueless white male who blithely exploits the underclass and doesn't see or care about their misery?

I did go on to tell her, since the textbook apparently wasn't going to, that the "Songs of Innocence" were a child's view of creation and of the child's environment, with a lot of bad stuff overlooked or explained away because the child simply couldn't deal with it; and "Songs of Experience" were the view of an adult who couldn't overlook the bad stuff. So you have "Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee clothing of delight, softest clothing, wooly, bright," and so on, and then in "The Tyger", "When the stars threw down their spears and watered Heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?" It's a very powerful and evocative expression of the difficulty of making sense of the world when you have to face hard-to-deal-with realities. This appear to me to be low-hanging fruit for textbook writers who are trying to appeal to something in their teenaged readers.

Minerva -- if that is your real name -- I'm not quite sure what your complaint is.

I'm not demonizing Fox News. I do see Fox News as having innovated and popularized one prevalent notion of "unbiasedness," which they refer to as "fair and balanced." For Fox, and for many Americans, news cannot be objective, and so instead the key is to put talking heads into conflict with one another. Pluralism takes over from disinterestedness. That Fox and similar news sources reduce issues almost completely to us/them, right/left simplicities is one of the dangers of this approach. (As many people have noted, conservatives now use the academic critique of foundationalism and objectivity more than academics.)

This seems to be the model of education Bauerlein is promoting. That it's not empiricist, that it isn't rooted in some dream of inquiry and the pursuit of truth, that it abandons the hope of objectivity, is readily apparent. Instead, students are to be passive and take in two, rather than one, viewpoints. O happy days.

And as I wrote over at his original post, Bauerlein is basically in complete agreement with bell hooks; he simply is flipping the terms around. hooks says universities once had conservative bias; bauerlein now says they have leftwing bias.

Minerva, if you think Fox News is "the demon," that's all fine and well. But don't impose your assumptions on others. I get my news from all the best sources: conspiracy theory blogs.

Bauerlein’s theory has a tinge of Orwellian “thoughtcrime” to it. If instructors “pretty much stick to their jobs of teaching a field and pursuing more or less apolitical topics”, then why should they have to second guess whether they are “biased” according to Bauerlein’s criteria? It reminds of a passage from 1984:

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a briefcase. They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.”

The clearest example of soft bias on most college campuses is found in economics courses. Anything that deviates from Milton Friedman fundamentalism is viewed by most academic economists as "unserious." They never examine their own assumptions.