A stealth attack on the right?

The electorate is pretty evenly divided at present and the Republican vote has fallen below 40 percent only twice since 1944 (1964 and 1992), under special circumstances. It is an embarrassment that the huge educational industry of the country has functioned so that numerical dominance of the left has increased throughout the past century. The shift is similar to that seen in the “mainstream” media. The media has shown itself prone to certain errors because of its lack of sufficient diversity of thought in the newsroom. Our educational institutions are also at risk of seeing and teaching only one side of some issues due to lack of intellectual diversity. It is not possible to arrive at Veritas when half the population is excluded from the discussion.

The AFT, probably correctly, opposes proposed “Academic Bill of Rights” laws (“Silencing the professoriate,” AFT On Campus, May/June 2005), but what remedy does the AFT propose for the hiring bias that has resulted in the near exclusion of Republicans from educational institutions?

—Raymond R. White
Palo Alto, Calif.

Stop bashing -students

I was disturbed to see AFT On Campus indulge in anti-student sensationalism. February’s feature, “Keeping it sane,” declared that college counselors face “an entirely new scale of difficulty” over the last decade as “the number of students with depression has doubled, the number of suicidal students has tripled, and sexual assaults have gone up fourfold.”

Upon checking, I found that On Campus recycled these claims thirdhand from a dubious book, College of the Overwhelmed, which copied them secondhand from news reports of one study of one college clinic. That study actually reported declining percentages of students treated for mental health problems since the mid-1990s, and cautioned that any category increases might result from greater awareness.

On Campus’s story omitted compelling facts showing that students aren’t radically more messed up. First, depression diagnoses quadrupled since 1988 among all Americans because psychiatric/pharmaceutical interests aggressively expanded definitions of “depression.” (Studies find counselors and doctors drastically overestimate pathology among young people, in particular.) Second, the Big Ten study found students only half as likely to commit suicide as their non-college counterparts; older graduate students had much higher suicide rates than undergrads. Third, suicide among young adults fell sharply over the last decade, as have young women’s reports of rape and sexual assault in large-scale victimization studies.

On Campus’s claim that college students’ sexual assaults skyrocketed is prejudicial and based on small numbers from one campus. Using such limited data (i.e., Title IX sexual offense reports), faculty or staff misconduct could likewise be wildly hyped.

Journalistic-style exaggerations of student dangers invite reactionary crackdowns, damage public and legislative support for education, and violate students’ rights to basic academic standards of accuracy and fairness. The laudable goal of promoting adequate counseling staffs can be advanced without libeling today’s campuses as dens of suicidal rapists.

 —Mike Males
Santa Cruz, Calif.

Editor’s note: AFT On Campus stands by the statistics cited in the article, which are accurately reported and corroborated in other studies, including UCLA’s American Freshman survey and the International Association of Counseling Services’ National Survey of Counseling Center Directors (2001, 2004). More to the point, AFT On Campus stands by the article’s overriding premise that funding cuts to college counseling services could not be coming at a worse time.