‘Tenured Bigots’?

by Emily Guidry

August 14, 2007

In “Tenured Bigots,” an article in a recent issue of WORLD Magazine, author Mark Bergin reports the findings of a scientific survey measuring the “anti-evangelical bias” on college campuses. According to the survey, which was completed by the President of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research Gary A. Tobin, of 1,269 faculty members at 712 colleges and universities, 53 percent of respondents admitted to “harboring unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals.”
 
The number is staggering, especially considering the survey’s results showed that no other religion came close to evangelical Christians when it came to these “unfavorable feelings.” (Mormons were a distant second with a 33 percent “unfavorable outcome,” according to Tobin.)
 
FIRE regularly witnesses threats to the religious liberty of all students, and we defend groups across the religious and ideological spectrum, but as FIRE’s Robert Shibley points out in the article:
College campuses overall are not living up to the ideal of having a marketplace of ideas, of having true intellectual diversity to go along with racial and religious diversity. In too many cases we see groups—evangelical Christians and conservatives, primarily—face sanctions or punishments that are more severe than those of groups with other viewpoints. Or they’re punished for things that other groups wouldn’t be punished for at all.