Perhaps a bit late but there has been a controversy over the study of the supposed "liberal bias" and "political indoctrination" of California's higher education called A Crisis of Competence (pdf.) by the conservative group the National Association of Scholars.
While most of the study consists of anecdotes, one part deals with history classes at the UC schools and is what lead to Rick Santorum making his hilarious remark some time ago.
The methodology of the report is is to look at the names and descriptions of the history classes (as opposed to, you know, actually studying the classes) which evidently all have some kind of liberal bias.
Eric Rauchway has a good take down.
As he points out:
...the paper insists that even to teach about African American history, about immigration history, about race, class, and gender, about labor, about Asian Americans – about the Civil War! – is to “focus on the nation’s shortcomings, as well as on victimology and oppression.”
For many Americans, the history of the nation’s minorities is a point of pride, as indeed is the history of the labor movement – and in fact the history of our Civil War, by which Americans ended chattel slavery in the United States and created of a loose confederation of states a modern nation. The insistence that to focus on these subjects is inherently negative is, simply, bizarre.
The study actually considers it liberal, biased, subversive etc. to teach basic American history. Evidently American history (as well as reality) has a liberal bias.
What's more disturbing is people are taking the study seriously.
In a report (pdf.) on the UC schools it cited the NAS report for fears of "political indoctrination." This was articulated by the president of the UC president Mark Yudof.
This is of course in addition to the increasing privatization of college (see my kos from last year) which in many ways has been internalized in California.
As the this report on UC schools makes clear of the "real threat":
However, this report shows the real threat to the preeminence of California’s higher education is not a lack of funds....Rather, the real danger is a fundamental failure by today’s trustees and system leaders to apply the same creativity and thoughtfulness...to a new world of reduced resources and a shrinking tax base.
Your heard it right, losing money isn't the problem, the real issue is making the best of what scraps remain.
These two pressures are not unrelated. The ultimate goal is a privatized University to educate the elite, without all the pitfalls of having to know actual history. As Paul Krugman puts it in a subheading, it's essentially like "Sovietizing the universities."
If we don't act, this might just happen.
Theory
On a slightly unrelated note I just want to point out that while political activities and history were considered subversive, postmodern "Theory" was not. Outside of a swipe at Judith Butler's "infamous sentence" by the NAS people, it seems that High Theory does not warrant an attack the way basic history does.
While Zizek rightfully points out:
The name is so-called Bologna high education reform, and the goal is very clear. They say it. It’s to make universities more responsive to social life, to social problems. It sounds nice. What it really means is that we should all become experts....Like, we should be here as a kind of a ideological or specialist serviceman to resolve problems formulated by others. I think this is the end of intellectual life as we know it.
It seems like as far as I can tell, there weren't any specific complaints from post-modern theorists anywhere on cuts to their field outside of say
Judith Butler protesting general cuts. (I could be completely wrong of course).
It's worth remembering that it took mass walkouts to get subjects like African American studies; in the case of the supposedly subversive High Theory, there was no struggle. The lack of attacks on postmodernist theory despite all the calls for a Sovietized University seems to confirm the suspicions of people like Chomsky who say much of it is just gibberish or truisms which draws energy away from real causes.
Anyways sorry for all the attention on this issue, I've just had a lot of recent discussions with people that are into Continental philosophy.
Economics and other Humanities
To change the subject a bit from theory, I want to focus on economics and other humanities like sociology.
One thing that was surprising was a lack of decrying over humanities and specifically Macroeconomics even though for the elite these have a distinct "leftist" bias.
I guess either they just don't care or weren't clever enough to pick up on it or in the case of economics its just in such a bad state with Chicago School and Austrian economics on the rise that it doesn't come into effect.