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Political Science - American National Government?

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I'm not sure if I want to take Political Science (American National Government) this summer. The other social sciences I've taken tended to have liberal professors. My sociology professor trashed America and asked tons of biased questions. My psychology textbook pointed to Sweden as a role model. According to Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, Germany did the same thing at the very beginning stages of Nazi Germany. I had two economics professors. One advocated voting for Obama and the other leaned towards free market.

Well, now I'm skeptical about whether Political Science (American National Government) is another hole-riddled network of ideas, or very valuable as long as awareness of potential agenda is kept in mind. Here is the textbook for this class on Amazon and it lets you browse through it a bit:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Government-Politics-Today-Essentials/dp/053849719X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305381371&sr=8-1

What do you think? Does this textbook look biased to you? If so, is it just a light bias and nothing to fret over? (I have an interest in American politics, Constitution stuff, the American Revolution, etc.)

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I have taken a number of political science and sociology classes. Generally speaking, they are more likely to be left-leaning than not, especially sociology. Though political science classes are less likely than sociology I feel, and in the economics area it has been, for me at least, since I have taken a number of them, pretty much a 50/50 chance. However, as has been said, you cannot really predict this in any accurate way, it depends squarely on the professor. You can find out what a professors class is like relatively easily in many cases by asking people you know around campus, ratemyprofessor.com is good in general for finding professors but you likely won't find out much about their political or other leanings there.

Edited by CapitalistSwine
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I took one Sociology class. Guy was sort of a liberal, but since had a bit of an accent, I don't think he was ready to push an agenda too aggressively. Same thing with Political Science. You could sort of tell that she was a liberal. It's something you gotta be desensitized to.

The worst class I ever took in regard to political bias was Early American Literature. The guy was very opinionated, and said many things that would offend people, and he was so over-the-top about it. He said that homosexuality only exists in Africa because Christian ministries would rape little boys, he said that "They murder people in the military", he said that the police is a conspiracy for white men to kill black people, oh God the list goes on. On the plus side, I made many friends over my mutual hatred for the professor. (I wonder what a guy look this would respond to reading Berliner's article on Columbus day)

Thomas Sowell once said something about liberals being concentrated in institutions where ideas don't need to work. Unfortunately, these institutions where ideas don't "need to work" also churn out journalists and writers.

Edited by Black Wolf
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At one point I was pursuing a degree in Pol Sci, every class I had except one was left leaning. One, entitled "Global Political Issues" I soon began openly calling the Leftist Diatribes. In one of my essays which I came out in favor of capitalism over communism I was condemned for my "skewed, and western dominated world view." Ug. I never did finish my degree, I couldn't see my way past the BS.

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Zip,

I do not blame you.

I was luckier in that my degree was (back then at least) non-politicized. Electrical Engineering (Computer Science Option). I suppose the viros have probably gotten in there by now, teaching people it's wrong to design things to consume too much power (and it wouldn't be too much of a reach in any case, for it is part of an engineer's goal to avoid inefficiency).

Nonetheless I had to take 24 hours of "social humanistic electives" and six of them had to be English classes (tested out of those via Advanced Placement thank the Lord God Tarskyte, or I'd've gone nuts enduring another year of reading crappy literature). The other 18 hours were a much more interesting story. I managed to avoid any overly leftist courses, at CU-Boulder! A long story but I'll focus on the Poli-Sci aspects of it. At one point I had to decide whether I'd take some political science or some economics classes to take up the 13 hours I still had left, and I signed up for both intro level classes, thinking I'd go to the first lecture of each, decide based on what I heard, and drop one of them. Microeconomics had a reputation for being relatively non-politicized, but intro to Poli Sci... The instructor, that first day, defined politics as "how a society decides who gets what" (that's a paraphrase of whatever he did actually say). I stuck with microeconomics. (Which turned out to be an easy course.)

I eventually reached a point where I needed exactly four credit hours to finish off these electives... and I did take a political science course, upper division. I had to be interviewed by the professor to get in but I suspect some ex-students of his helped recommend me. It was titled "Soviet Foreign Policy" and was taught by the one non-Marxist in the department--a man who grew up in Poland in the 1920s and 30s and who had fought the Soviets (when they invaded) and then the Nazis (when they invaded what was now the USSR). Compared to that the continuous campaign to get him kicked off the faculty (which even included being tried on false criminal charges leveled against him by the District Attorney, who wasn't even connected with the University!) must have seemed like a walk in the park. Anyhow he ended up giving me my only non-A grade (B+), but then on the other hand it was the only one of the "social humanistic" classes I took where I actually learned some significant stuff.

The remaining 11 credit hours of Leftist-Indoctrination-Avoidance are a subject for another thread.

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