Rebuttal to Dr. Brandon T. Jett

The following was written in response to Southwest Florida Colliege history professor Brandon T. Jett's guest editorial opinion in the Ft. Myers News-Press on May 20, 2021.  His editorial--“Colleges and Universities are not sites of liberal indoctrination” -- may be accessed "HERE."     

Dr. Brandon T. Jett’s claim that today’s colleges are “largely” not bastions of liberal indoctrination is so fundamentally off-target that one wonders how the local history professor could have it so wrong.  Jett writes that today’s campus faculty is “as diverse as the communities” they serve is ludicrous and easily disproven.  Study after study has shown college faculty to be overwhelmingly liberal, especially in the humanities. Due to this fact, even liberal professor-researchers such as Jonathan Haidt are alarmed.  Simply Google the phrase “how academia’s liberal bias is hurting research” and many studies will appear, some going back for decades. Nearly all the faculty in many of the fields within the humanities are Leftists. Today, advocates of Critical Race Theory argue we should turn our nation upside down due to the “unconscious bias” of whites, yet 82% of the college faculty in one study revealed “they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative [job] candidate.” This is a conscious bias that Dr. Jett won’t discuss. Nor did he address the fact that “More Than Two-Thirds of Conservative Academics Report Political Bias.” This survey, sent to over 40,000 professors, reported pervasively hostile abuse and discrimination against conservatives.  Some colleges of education are threatening to bestow diplomas upon students who lack ‘woke’ understanding.  Entire classes of freshmen are required to attend “woke” orientations where they indeed indoctrinated to a certain worldview. Dr. Jett knows full well that Howard Zinn’s famously un-American and deliberately leftist book, “A People’s History of the United States,” became one of the most sold volumes in publication history because so many college professors used it as required reading. If colleges were not bastions of indoctrination, why would so many be engaged in shutting down free speech? Why would organizations such as “Campus Reform” or “Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [F.I.R.E.] exist? Perhaps Dr. Jett should visit their webpages.

     Dr. Jett claims that “there are strong contingents of conservative faculty” but not in the fields of education, the humanities, or even today in the schools of Business, Engineering or the Sciences — all of which are increasingly coming under the sway of Leftist administrators and faculty. Professor Jett avows that “for every class on economic, social and racial problems, there are courses that explore the moral and ethical foundations of capitalism.” But will these courses have an adequate exposure to the benefits of free-markets or will there be a clearly Marxist bent to them? To answer this requires only an examination of approved and rejected quest lecturers and commencement speakers. Condoleeza Rice, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Ben Shapiro, Mike Pence all banned or heavily protested while race-baiters such as Ibram X. Kendhi, Al Sharpton and Robin D’Angelo, noted terrorists such as Leila Khalid, and self-avowed communists such as Angela Davis are invited and celebrated. Nor does his claim explain why so many of today’s institutions of higher learning have succumbed to the old adage of Jesse Jackson’s chant when he visited Berkeley a generation or two ago, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho—Western Civilization has got to go!” The once-required “survey” courses in American history and Western Civilization were long ago replaced with Far-Left ‘elective course’ requirements or with newly required “Social Justice” courses.  And as Heather MacDonald has repeatedly made clear, some of the most highly paid and influential college administrators are the Directors of Diversity and Inclusion—virtually none of whom can be viewed as conservative.  Nor does Professor care to comment on the idea of some at Harvard to revoke the degrees that institution has bestowed upon influential conservative graduates. And yet Dr. Jett wants his readers to believe Harvard really does believe in diversity!? 

      Professor Jett’s argument that Governor DeSantis and Byron Donalds did not graduate from Florida’s universities as avowed liberals isn’t convincing evidence such bias doesn’t exist.  That far too many of our students ARE is more evident from the $2 billion in damages caused mostly by leftist college students around the country last summer!

Jack Bovee

Ft. Myers

The writer has been a social studies educator, founder of Rho Kappa—the National Social Studies Honor Society--and a former elementary school principal.  He may be reached at JSBovee@aol.com.