从 Russian troll accounts 到cultural Marxism； 从US，到UK，Europe，澳大利亚，几乎全部西方国家；从政治圈，到媒体圈；是polarisation，还是与年龄相关？下面的文章有一个多方面的讨论。
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/are-universities-hotbeds-left-wing-bias?
读取该文章好像需登录，我将自认为的“要点”摘录如下。
Some points：
1）The Twitter account @TEN_GOP became “a heavyweight voice on the American far right”, racking up more than 130,000 followers drawn by its frenzied support for Donald Trump and attacks on liberal targets. The account gained retweets from Donald Trump Jr and Ann Coulter, while media outlets including The Washington Postand Huffington Postembedded its tweets in stories as examples of public opinion.
But anyone who thought that @TEN_GOP was writing from Tennessee was miles off – about 5,000 miles off. A list of charges filed by special counsel Robert Mueller last year against 13 named Russian individuals and three Russian companies said that it was actually the handiwork of the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a troll farm that worked to “interfere with US political and electoral processes”.
2）But claims from right-wing politicians and media figures that universities are guilty of left-wing or liberal “bias” in their teaching or research are not just evident in the US; they are increasingly prominent in the UK, continental Europe and Australia, potentially posing serious risks to the public and political standing of universities.
3）Controversies over campus free speech, which are typically focused on the behaviour of students, are close siblings to controversies over academics’ supposed ideological bias. The tenor of the frequent media attacks on so-called “snowflakes”, who rush to shut down debate as soon as they catch a whiff of challenge to their progressive views, imports from the US the “culture wars” approach to universities. That approach has intensified in recent years, fuelled initially by the agitations of conservative activist David Horowitz – who summed up his argument in his 2007 book, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War against Academic Freedom.
4）Since then, politics and media have only polarised further. “If you watch [right-wing] Fox News when there’s been some incident where a liberal faculty member is behaving inappropriately, it’s wall-to-wall coverage,” says Matthew Woessner, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Pennsylvania State UniversityHarrisburg. “If you turn on [more liberal] MSNBC, it hardly gets a mention…So I think the polarisation of the media contributes to a polarisation in public perceptions of higher education.”
5）That study, “The Social And Political Views of American Professors”, co-authored with Solon Simmons in 2007, took a sample of 1,400 individuals across the 20 biggest disciplines in terms of degrees awarded nationally, and asked respondents to categorise their political beliefs. It found that “44.1 percent of respondents can be classified as liberals, 46.6 percent as moderates, and 9.2 percent as conservatives”.
But does this leftward lean of academics translate into bias in university teaching?
6）Curtice says that “the relationship between age and social liberalism is not simply a function of differences of educational background by age: younger people tend to be more liberal irrespective [of education]”.
Perhaps claims of ideological bias in higher education are more about the anxieties of modern conservatism than about universities themselves – about perceived loss of cultural hegemony to the left, about the right’s anxieties over social liberalism. But, regardless of the reliability of their evidence base or the politics of their source, such claims can still damage universities. If conservative suspicion of universities feeds through into a breakdown of consensus over higher education funding – already evident in many US states – then the consequences will be serious. And in an era in which often overtly anti-intellectual right-wing populist parties with non-graduate voter bases are becoming increasingly influential around the world, the culture wars over universities are likely to spread and intensify beyond their traditional front line in the US.
7）In many nations, the divide between graduates and non-graduates is coming to be seen as the key battleground of modern politics, potentially further isolating universities from sections of right-wing opinion. So it is more important than ever that further research is carried out into how and why the experience of higher education affects graduates’ political and social views. Otherwise, it will not merely be Russian trolls using universities to widen divides and promote their political agenda.
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