My concern comes from biases which may exist in individual teachers, their material and the broader curriculum (where the marginally more maleable minds of children and teenagers are concerned).

I picked up some primary school teaching material at Borders today on Australian Prime Ministers.

Rudd is portrayed as a hero of sorts on a par with Gough Whitlam with glory references to the “education revolution” and other such fiction.

Howard, on the other hand was mediocre at best and Fraser was portrayed as some right wing usurper of the throne who achieved very little at best.

How you regulate this I don’t know. I think the best response is simply for “good men to do SOMETHING” and ensure access to more “fair and balanced” material to offset the “left wing rubbish”.

No. Part is to make students happy and part is to help make subjects better since you can get very different marks in different subjects (although the feedback is often quite poor — people complain about anything and everything, like schedules, dirty rooms, broken equipment etc. — nothing you can do anything about. In addition, the surveys they use are often poorly designed, so everything correlates with everything, so you don’t know what aspects students don’t like. You may as well just have used a single like/dislike question).
Unfortunately, at places like mine where you are supposed to take them seriously (many places don’t), it means you end with subjects driven by student expectations. A subject I run, for example, is turning into a multi-choice one this year after students complained they didn’t like written answers in exams. Another example is what students expect to do with assignments — I have to tell students I won’t tell them how to format tables (!! - as it turns out, other lecturers tell them how and they expect you too as well) otherwise they complain. Similarily, I used to like to set assignments which they couldn’t solve via intuition (it forces them to methodologically solve problems), but they complain too much about that too. C’est la vie I guess.

Incidentally, most people I know are happy to have students criticize their work/opinions, and I work in a place with a fair few hard-left people (although the subjects are generally not especially political).

But there is a LOT of bias in how the courses are taught and in the reading materials. For example, in my “public policy making” subject which I’m taking now, the reading pack is totally stacked with “left-wing” socialist stuff (there’s no textbook). The lecturer mostly invites guest lecturers from charities, who push their own “more government funding” agenda.

It was even worse in “Indigenous People and the State” (taught by an indigenous lecturer who seemed unable to look objectively at the situation). It’s like a deliberate attempt to ensure students think there is no disagreement on the issues.

The most balanced subjects I’ve taken so far are the international relations subjects.

But it’s the purpose of the student surveys to weed bad lecturers out isn’t it?

Is Policy considered a refereed journal? Because it doesn’t come up in most searches on the uni database.

I do agree we need more libertarian academics. But it’s quite a nerdy job, so I guess not many libertarians would interested in it. It’s not bias. Libertarian foreign policy, and a some social policy, reflects the consensus view in Australia (e.g. get out of Iraq, concern over civil liberties) and economics is very empirical so that is judged on its own merits via peer-review. Political philosophy might be different.

You attribute too few academics in part to self-selection but isn’t the problem that potential academics self-select out because they perceive hostility or discrimination towards their views?

No one wants to work in an environment where the views get mocked or are treated with contempt, and my experience of ANU is that far from being an open-minded environment of free inquiry, the politics department is openly hostile to liberal and conservative viewpoints.