Should I be sad?

Let me start off by apologizing. Not only have I not posted all summer, but I promised at one point that I would, only to not follow up. Not that anyone reads this. But I still feel guilty.

So--having finished my job and summer classes, I thought I'd kick-start the new blogging season with a kind of funny/kind of sad thing I found:

Next year (starting this fall) is my senior year, so I am beginning (kind of late, I think) to look at graduate schools, not just in Sociology, but also in American Studies, Women's Studies and other interdisciplinary programs. After looking at a few, I decided to simply type in a few of my interests into Google to see what I would find. Maybe I'd find some exciting sociologist/interdisciplinarian with similar interests, or maybe I'd find a department with similar focuses.

It probably would have been more effective to have only searched for a few at once, but, either way, I searched for about 10 or so (as many as Google would let me!), and of the 7 results, all but 2 were about the awful state of American higher education and the liberal bias found on college campuses. The top result, found here, is from the Young America Foundation, and details courses that unsuspecting college students have been forced to take. How awful! Our youth are being corrupted! (Should I be sad that most of the courses they listed sound pretty interesting to me?)

This gets me to the broader issue of liberal bias in the academy. I'm not really going to discuss it in general, but I am going to complain about an editorial I read a few months ago, which bemoaned the fact that surveys show that more college and university professors identify themselves as liberal than conservative. (As my roommate Ema just pointed out: shouldn't it say something that the most educated among us tend to be liberal??) Who is going to want to go into a career that requires a great deal of education and investment for little monetary return? I would venture to guess that conservatives are less likely to make that choice. I would say that, more than anything, there is a great deal of self-selection going on rather than discrimination based on political affiliations or beliefs.

There is alot, alot more that could be said about this. And, if I were a good blogger, I probably would. But, if nothing else, the past few months have demonstrated that I am an incurably bad blogger, so I'll just leave it at that.