Letter: Students blinded by their political opinions

Editor,

I recently made the agonizing decision to abandon a budding career as an academic in favor of practicing law. The decision was indeed difficult because in more than 30 years of earning wages, I have never had a job as challenging, fulfilling and downright fun as helping college students educate themselves.

The single factor that weighed most heavily on the push side of the equation, however, was not the petty professorial vendettas, the often entitled and lazy graduate students or the tired cynicism and dismissal of undergraduates by too many of my peers.

Rather, it was that students, with increasing frequency, are simply refusing to learn.

I am not referring to the explosion of Internet-facilitated plagiarism or to what many academics perceive to be the disappointing erosion of learning for learning's sake. In my experience, many students still exhibit a hunger for knowledge and a willingness to work hard that is truly inspiring.

Instead, I am talking about what two decades as a student, professional scholar and instructor on three college campuses has convinced me is the increasingly obstinate refusal of many students to consider any information contrary to what they would like to believe about their elected leaders.

This is not about any particular political agenda. I am talking about a kind of blind loyalty on both sides of the political aisle that confronts reasoned argument and objective evidence with reflexive intransigence and even hostility. I am talking about a basic inability or unwillingness to entertain the mere suggestion that conviction might be the product of experience and sober reflection and is therefore open to revision. That even the most basic ideas about right and wrong might be grounded in the rational assessment of a particular action in light of certain overarching principles - and, therefore, that intellectual honesty and humility are as important to sound moral reasoning as courage and consistency are to moral behavior.

Ultimately, it does not matter if we are talking about President George Bush rather than Bill Clinton, or if we are talking about spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of people on false pretences rather than lying about an extramarital affair. What matters is that college students who are unable or unwilling to distinguish between rationality and unconditional emotional attachment are presumably going to be among tomorrow's leaders - and that our troubles are only just beginning.

Joel M. Young

UNM IT Research Group