“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is wont to say. But at the University of California, Berkeley, some professors don’t even care about your facts.
Berkeley Professor of History Brian DeLay argued that teaching evaluations should no longer be considered for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions in a series of tweets on Sunday, Campus Reform reported.
“They’re going to get it wrong,” DeLay tweeted, citing a 2016 study by a fellow Berkeley professor showing that students tend to rate female instructors lower than their white, male colleagues. Predictably, he recommended that “[t]enured white male faculty, in particular, should help their students understand this.”
What DeLay did not consider is the possibility that students rating professors are not discriminatory. Instructors who happen to be female at Berkeley may coincidentally be less satisfactory to students in general. Rather than asking why the study found the results it did, DeLay jumped to the conclusion that the finding must be evidence of sexism and that this conclusion morally obligates the university to stop using teaching evaluations.
DeLay also did not call for further research into the study’s finding that male history students rate male history instructors higher even though they perform worse under male history instructors on final exams, nor did he posit other reasons why these students rated their professors higher aside from simple sexism. DeLay could have even hazarded the guess that perhaps final exam scores are not an accurate measure of teaching effectiveness or student satisfaction.
DeLay’s comments come on the heels of another story out of Berkeley that grabbed national headlines: that of Isabella Chow, a recently elected student senator and Christian who was disowned by her own political party for merely abstaining from a vote on transgenderism. The vote was on a resolution opposing the Trump administration’s interpretation of the word “sex” in Title IX legislation as “biological sex” rather than “gender identity.”
Even though she abstained from the vote, she was protested by hundreds of her peers. The student newspaper, the Daily Californian, even refused to publish an op-ed of hers explaining her abstention as motivated by her deeply held religious belief that God created only two genders.
As a recent graduate from Berkeley, I can say that DeLay’s comments and the furor over Chow are just two instances of a far larger trend on the Left: the movement toward an ideology that is radically anti-science.
The ideological worldview gaining increasing acceptance on college campuses is one that disregards studies and evaluations if they present empirical findings that show women or minorities in an unfavorable light.
Liberals are no longer accepting empirical results just because they have a basis in reality. Instead, they are rejecting them and labeling them as “hate facts” if they do not fit into their leftist ideology.
The one and only dogma of far-left thought is this: Underprivileged groups can do no wrong because they are oppressed by society; any shortcoming or failure by minorities is the fault of their oppressors. College professors and their students cling to this single explanatory variable religiously and, like true zealots, reject all evidence which discounts the master theory of their faith.
Therefore, the students cannot possibly be giving female instructors lower ratings because they happen to be not quite as good at providing the students with the kind of instruction and educational experiences they desire. Rather, the students must be racist or sexist, consciously or unconsciously. (Keep in mind they would be applying this theory to minority students giving out ratings, not just privileged white male students.)
Professor Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and founder of Heterodox Academy, is correct in positing that campus progressivism (and other political ideologies) display many features of a religious faith even while remaining secular. Violate the taboos and norms of the leftist faith (even with empirical evidence, the basis of the science the Left wholeheartedly claims to accept) and you will find yourself under vicious, illogical attack.
The only question that remains: When will campus progressives be honest for once and admit they value ideology over reality?
Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.
