Quit twisting my words
An American government textbook author defends his work against allegations of conservative bias.
Of course some textbooks are politically biased. It is not hard to understand why. Opinion surveys and studies of campaign contributions show that the great majority of academic social scientists are liberals, so no one should be astonished to learn that some liberals write left-leaning textbooks and that some of them assign them to their classes.
No doubt there are right-wing textbooks as well, though I suspect that, given the shortage of conservative historians and political scientists, there are fewer of them.
But in my experience, most textbooks about politics are what we call "mainstream": That is, they try hard to cover the facts without seeking to persuade students to support or oppose any particular public policy. I suspect this is not only because of the desire of authors to be fair but a result of the publishers' editorial process.
Before each edition of my text, co-written with John J. DiIulio, is revised every three years, the publisher asks teachers who both do and do not use it to read it and write a lengthy critique. DiIulio and I do not know the names of these reviewers, whose suggestions come to us anonymously.
The comments generally encourage us to write somewhat more about things we have neglected or somewhat less about things we have emphasized. Sometimes, although rarely, they find elements of bias, and in those cases, they urge us to be fairer.
The publishers of other mainstream texts probably do the same thing. The result is that most widely used American government textbooks are relatively free of bias. We also read comments from student users of the book. In the 27 years since our book first appeared, I can recall only one complaint of bias. This came from a student who accused us of being too liberal. The evidence for this, she said, was that when we printed election data in a table, we mentioned the Democrats first. I responded that this was because we put the parties in alphabetical order. I hope that satisfied her.
But of late there has been a sudden flurry of charges that our book has a deep conservative bias. The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit organization devoted to "secularism and planetary ethics," published a lengthy complaint saying that we had said the country was founded on a belief in "original sin" and that the text misinterprets the Supreme Court's rulings on school prayer. Two letters from space scientists say we give too little support to the idea of global warming.
