The Mis-Educated Class

The results of the Massachusetts election to replace Ted Kennedy were startling. Not only did Republican Scott Brown emerge victorious, but a breakdown of who voted for whom showed an odd pattern.
What became clear is that while blue-collar workers favored Brown, upper-middle class types residing in neighborhoods adjacent to universities such as Harvard preferred Martha Coakley. They chose her liberal principles over the more conservative leanings of her opponent.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has of late been describing the Coakley crowd as the Educated Class. These are the same folks he not long ago dubbed Bobos. The term Bobo is itself a contraction for Bourgeois Bohemians. In this, Brooks alludes to the superior educational credentials of the new upper middle class.
The Bobos, and presumably the Educated Class, owe their enhanced status to their cultural expertise. Having gone to school longer, and generally accumulated better grades than their rivals, they take pride in knowing more about how the world works than their less accomplished peers. As a result, they assume that their political choices are better informed and more expert.
Not to put too fine a point on the matter, these social leaders are inclined to be liberal in their thinking. From their perspective, conservatives are ill-educated dupes who are too ignorant to make good decisions. Rather, they assume that they are themselves “the best and brightest,” and hence that others would do best to follow their lead.
In fact, the bobos are better educated than most. But this is not saying much. Their education has unfortunately led them astray. As quick learners, they readily absorbed what they were taught, but what they were taught was often a gross distortion of the truth.
Higher education has always harbored biases, but today these increasingly tilt left. In disciplines such as my own—namely Sociology—the ratio of liberals to conservatives is thirty-to-one. That’s right thirty-to-one. In other words, a sociology student can go through an entire college career without ever hearing a cogent conservative opinion. In disciplines such as English and Anthropology the situation is not much better. In History and Political Science it is only marginally so.
To give a sense of the climate on college campuses, several months ago, as the two of us walked down a hallway, a colleague informed me that the debate over global warming was over. There were, in this professor’s emphatic opinion, no serious climate scientists who disputed this conclusion.
I, however, having recently read up on the subject knew he was wrong—and said so. But what of the students at his mercy in the classroom. Many must simply have accepted his authority. Others might have wished to question him, but feared being crushed for their trouble. The message would be clear, i.e., there was only one acceptable position for an educated person.
Or consider that fact that many of my colleagues are unabashed neo-Marxists. They may call themselves “conflict theorists,” but their allegiances are in no doubt. These professors openly advocate the elimination of private property. In their view, this would hasten a utopian society in which everyone becomes equal to everyone else.
But how would this idealized society operate? Has anyone ever seen a society from which property ownership has been eliminated or where everyone has equal status? No matter! These authorities assure their students that the fault lies with a selfish elite, which, after it is tamed, will be unable to staunch progress.
In the end, many of our best students wind up thoroughly brainwashed. They become committed to leftist verities—assuming not only that these are scientific, but also morally superior.
To describe such folks as an Educated Class is in a certain respect apt. Nevertheless, it is also misleading. They may be learned, but they are not genuinely knowledgeable. What they think they know is, in fact, an artifact of the cultural leanings of their teachers.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University