A university is supposed to be a place in which the free and open exchange of ideas takes place, where people from all political persuasions can meet and discuss any topic without fear of retribution. And for the most part this is entirely true of UAA, which maintains a presence of a healthy and active membership of politically oriented clubs such as the College Republicans, College Democrats and Students for Social Equality.
There is, however, a serious problem with political bias within the establishment itself that can be revealed without any sort of investigation of the administration or even the various liberal arts professors. All one has to do in order to discover this deeply rooted bias is stroll over to the University Bookstore.
The simple truth of the matter is, any student looking to purchase a conservative- or libertarian- leaning book on campus will find the task near impossible, where books promoting liberalism are in abundance.
The first place my search brought me was the Current Events section in the trade books area. Here I found a pair of Bush-era hit pieces by Justin Frank, Bush on the Couch and The Greatest Story Ever Sold, reminding us twenty months into the Obama presidency just how much of an evil genius and incompetent buffoon our former president was (I never really understood how he managed to be both).
The rest of this section was jam-packed with the typical mantra of how America is a terrible place and why conservatives are downright evil, with an all-star cast of liberal authors including the cartoonish US Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, long-time anti-American guru Noam Chomsky, Marxist journalist John Pilger and former one-term President Jimmy Carter.
Out of a grand total of 15 books under Current Events, there were 11 on the political left; four were neutral, leaving us without a single conservative book.
But of course, one would think the Society and Economics section would be different, considering the vast majority of economics books were written by advocates of the free-market, a system strongly championed by conservatives and libertarians. Books such as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, which laid the groundwork for modern economic theory, or perhaps the highly influential Capitalism and Freedom, authored by Milton Friedman, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics; but no, amazingly neither of these two great classics can be found anywhere on the shelves.
You will not find Ayn Rand’s groundbreaking novel Atlas Shrugged, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson or anything at all by Thomas Sowell or Ludwig Von Mises, both widely praised, published economists and political philosophers.
What you will find are books like The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which interestingly enough isn’t written by an economist at all, but instead by the political activist and unabashed economic illiterate Naomi Klein.
Sitting quite prominently next to this collection of 576 pages unfit for toilet paper is Nickel and Dimed, another misguided attack on the free-market by socialist Barbara Ehrenreich, who coincidentally enough also has absolutely no economic credentials outside of her daily readings from Das Kapital.
Out of the entire Society and Economics section, there were ten liberal books, eight neutral, and one conservative book. Yes, I was able to actually discover one on the very bottom of the shelf. Right next to 100 Ways America is Screwing up the World was the only book that espoused conservative politics, The Savage Nation by a conservative radio-host out of San Francisco, Michael Savage.
Unless 95 percent (literally) of students interested in politics also happen to be adamant Marxists, then there is something very wrong with the lack of conservative views represented at the UAA bookstore.
The policy of the university shouldn’t be to indoctrinate the students by monopolizing the shelves with one particular ideology, but instead at the very least it should try to appear as balanced as possible by providing books from multiple political persuasions in order that the students may have the best environment available in which to make up their own minds.
Whether this overt bias is an isolated case or whether it’s only a symptom of a deeper problem is yet to be seen, what we know for certain is that the largest university in Alaska, one of the most conservative states in the union, can do better than to have a single center-right book for sale.