Academic Bias
purepedantry | November 3, 2008Professors are not effective at indoctrinating their students with their own politics -- or so says a study in the journal PS as reported in the NYTimes:
A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.
"There is no evidence that an instructor's views instigate political change among students," Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife…
purepedantry | January 9, 2007Shocking:
The study, published by the Public Library of Science online journal PLoS Medicine, echoes other findings that show industry-funded research on drugs is more likely to be favorable to the drugs than independent research.
Ludwig's team reviewed 111 studies on soft drinks, juice and milk that were published between 1999 and 2003.
"We chose beverages because they represent an area of nutrition that's very controversial, that's relevant to children, and involves a part of the food industry that is highly profitable and where research findings could have direct financial implications,"…
purepedantry | August 18, 2006Is Arabic language instruction biased? Frank Salameh, writing in RCP, says yes (but not in the way that you would think):
At Middlebury College's Arabic Summer School, where I taught Arabic in 2004, students were exposed to more than intensive language instruction. Inside the classroom and across campus, administrators and language teachers adhered to a restrictive Arab-nationalist view of what is generically referred to as the "Arab world." In practice, this meant that the Middle East was presented as a mono-cultural, exclusively Arab region. The time-honored presence and deep-rooted…