Bias Watch: Georgetown University

Occasionally, students actually notice when they are in a biased course.

“I felt a certain idealistic giddiness upon enrolling in ‘Prisons & Punishment,’ a government course introduced during my senior year of college,” Danny Funt writes in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. “It was exciting to attach a resonant cause to academic inquiry, and about 95 percent of my classmates—Republican and Democrat—identified as supporters of criminal justice reform.”

“Our professor had a childhood friend who was wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his parents and then exonerated 17 years later. ‘This will be the most important course you take in college,’ the professor said on the first day of class.”

“I was startled to learn that several classmates would later complain that the class featured liberal advocacy.” Before enrolling at the Columbia University School of Journalism, which, of course, publishes CJR, Funt attended Georgetown, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Hoya.

The Georgetown catalogue does indeed list the P & P course among its offerings, taught by Marc Howard.

We should note that Howard and the course received no feedback similar to that which Funt recorded. Funt’s web page shows he has published extensively on subjects such as The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe.

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