USC Takes Left Turn

In the 2000 election cycle USC professors and staff members donated slightly more money to George Bush’s presidential campaign than to Al Gore. What a difference eight years make.

According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics for the current election cycle have given a total of $66,250 to presidential candidates with 98 percent of that amount going to Democrats making the university one of the most pro-democratic party campuses in the nation.

This has led USC political science professor Anthony Kammas to question the role of professors and elections and whether or not the university can maintain an appearance of being unbiased.

“It worries me that there’s this much weight on one side. They’re basically casting a vote with their dollars against the Republicans,” Kammas told the Daily Trojan . “You want to be able to say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter who I think is best. I want to know who you think is best.’”

This bias towards the Democrats though isn’t limited to USC. In 2000, Democratic candidates received 61 percent of the donations from the educrats. In 2004 that number rose to 78 percent and is currently at 76 percent for the current campaign.

Journalism professor Judy Muller told the Trojan that she was enthusiastic about donating to Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign after her career in the news industry prevented her from doing so because of bias concerns. She told the paper that she doesn’t proselytize her politics in her class and that’s not how she teaches.

But why shouldn’t journalism professors abide by the same general rules as the news industry when it comes to political donations and activity? After all isn’t she concerned about the appearance of bias in her classroom even though she claims not to proselytize? How can her students not think that she may have a bias when the records show she is an unabashed Obama supporter? Maybe what she really needs is to choose another profession.

For Luke Rosiak of the Center for Responsive Politics he sums up the trend by saying that the Bush administration’s eight-year run probably has more to do with the increased giving to Democrats than anything else. He believes that the professors feel that they need to “correct the course we’ve been on” and that “It’s no surprise that professors are liberal, but what does surprise people is that they’ve gotten so much more involved.”

At least he recognizes the liberalism of today’s professors but if they are looking for a course correction are Clinton, Obama and Edwards the direction they really want to see this country go in? That’s not a course correction, that’s a total off-the-map diversion.

As far as the professors getting more involved, maybe that is true from a donation standpoint, but they have been indoctrinating students in leftist ideology for decades so they have always been involved, but are now also more vocal than they have been in previous elections.

Bias in the newsroom begins with bias in the classroom.

Don Irvine is the chairman of both Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.