To the Editor:
I was disappointed to see in a feature on Scott Glabe '06 ("Dartmouth Senior Interns at Conservative Think Tank," Oct. 13) that the reader is misled into thinking there should be an imposed balance between liberals and conservatives in American education; in fact, there are good reasons that no such balance exists.
Mr. Glabe asks, "In a country divided 50-50, why are nine out of ten of our professors registered Democrats?" This is hardly a vast left-wing conspiracy: Democrats support teachers' unions and oppose imposing assessment-based curricula which tie their hands with red tape. Democrats support National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, which the Bush administration is trying to cut because artists, humanists and humanitarians are too liberal. Democrats support broadening the ranks of university departments and for syllabi to include people who aren't dead white men.
It is simply anti-educational to argue that we should not combat the effects of prejudice in our universities without proposing a viable alternative, or to say that curricula should be based on a highly subjective Western canon which includes Aristotle at the expense of Achebe. Yet Mr. Glabe insists on writing articles for The Dartmouth Review such as "The Hollow Curriculum" (June 2) in which he claims to "provide the reader with a pretty good idea of how little one could learn and still graduate from Dartmouth." Attaching a list of almost entirely Women and Gender Studies and African and African-American Studies classes, Mr. Glabe demonstrates his contempt for perspectives other than his own: the very definition of anti-educational. He was quoted by The Dartmouth as saying, "The most interesting debates today are among conservatives, because liberals are really searching for ideas." Really searching for ideas: sounds like an acceptable definition of education to me.
