Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias

A massive database shows college courses dealing with race and the Middle East lean sharply left

By Jon A. Shields and Yuval Avnur. Mr. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Mr. Avnur is a professor of philosophy at Scripps College. Excerpts:

"the Open Syllabus Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of more than 27 million syllabi scraped from the web."

"Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi, as it should given its scholarly and public influence. In the U.S. it is assigned more often than “Hamlet” and nearly as often as John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.”

Ms. Alexander argues that America’s war on drugs is akin to Jim Crow—a system designed to control and subjugate black Americans. Her work invites scholarly controversy, drawing criticism from historians and social scientists. Among them is James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017). While Mr. Forman is no fan of mass incarceration, he doesn’t think it’s the product of a racist conspiracy. He notes that tough-on-crime policies have enjoyed the support of black leaders trying to halt soaring crime rates in their cities.

In courses that teach Ms. Alexander’s book, Mr. Forman’s book is paired with it less than 4% of the time. Works by other prominent critics of “The New Jim Crow”—including political scientist Michael Fortner of Claremont McKenna, law professor John Pfaff of Fordham and sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton—are assigned with Ms. Alexander even less often.

Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault."

"Courses on the Middle East are similarly skewed. Edward Said (1935-2003) was Israel’s most influential scholarly detractor, chiefly because of the outsize influence of his 1978 book, “Orientalism.” It is the 16th-most-assigned text in the database"

"How often are such critics paired with Orientalism? Again, it’s uncommon."