Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias by Donald Lazere (review)

Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Biasis part of a book series by Palgrave Macmillan called Education, Politics, and Public Life. The series attempts to take an interdisciplinary and politically nuanced look at the education required to build an informed public, ultimately aiming to offer a reimagined view of politics, democratic struggles, and critical education. As the title suggests, Donald Lazere argues that college curricula and teaching methods should be slanted towards a leftist bias in order to provide a counterweight to what he sees as a heavily conservative bias elsewhere in society.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Countering the Bias of Business as Usual,” focuses on the “tacit” conservative nature of society, of students’ views, and of the mass media (p. vii). The second part, “Countering the Conservative Counter-Establishment,” focuses on “calculated” methods and viewpoints of conservatives in both mainstream media and in research (p. vii). The last part, just a quarter of the entire book, titled, “Responsible Leftist Teaching,” is dedicated to a polarizing case study of a leftist and conservative argument and ways to “cope” with the issues, including an annotated reading list. Throughout, Lazere laments about what he sees as the restrictive and uninformed bend of conservatism and its entry into our everyday lives, pinning the argument to a real concern for the need for informed, intelligent, and open debate in society.

In the preface, Lazere frames his argument with the responsibility of educators and leftist media to teach and use critical pedagogy in order to balance out the “tacit and calculated” and “far more powerful” conservative bias in America (p. vii). Lazere rightly points to the issue of unwavering habit of thought and its power over a shared public conscious. He argues that rather than engage in meaningful discussions about issues, conservatives dismiss leftists “as far off the charts of acceptable discourse as the Ku Klux Klan or American Nazis” (p. vii). He offers examples of leftist academics and reporters being quickly cut off or dismissed from televised news discussions and elsewhere in the media. Importantly, he momentarily notes that leftists have “misdeeds” (p. xi) and “isolated passages” (p. 167) too, but qualifies them as “miniscule in proportion” or “out of context,” thereby eliminating the mention of them entirely. Notably, despite writing a book that singles out conservative misdeeds, later in the book Lazere notes that he would not single these leftists out because doing so would “tar more creditable thinkers and ideas” (p. 167). In essence, Lazere attempts to say, however convoluted, that education must make up for the dismissal of alternative thinking (and often just pure facts) in the American mainstream, because certainly the American conservative mainstream machine is not going to hold out any olive branches for them.

In part one of the book, “Countering the Bias of Business as Usual,” Lazere focuses on the “norm” of society and touches on methods for countering that frame. “Humanistic education,” which would promote the humanities and ethics with a “comprehensive, coherent- but not doctrinairevision” would provide a commitment to critical pedagogy (p. 17). Lazere provides examples of discussions between leftists and conservatives, as well as transcripts from interviews of conservatives on issues. He frames these examples as evidence of “trickery” of the often unethical, corporate power-hungry conservatives who indeed simply do not value real debate couched in solid ethical and moral grounding. For example, Lazere quotes an interview between a reporter and a tobacco lobbyist from 20 years earlier, who blatantly dismisses the unethical nature of research firms hired by tobacco companies to counter scientific claims that tobacco is addictive. The lobbyist’s damning closing line regarding what the reporter called his “coldhearted, cynical, destructive set of values,” is included: “It’s the American way.” In part one, Lazaere continues to pull such evidence of conservative digressions from everything from sound bites to marketing schemes to emails with conservative academics, presenting them as disengaged, uncaring, uninformed, and anti-intellectual...