Join us for Heterodox Academy’s Research Colloquium Series, a virtual seminar series designed to highlight the scholarship and thought leadership emerging from our community. 

This colloquium will feature Eric Torres, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, presenting the results of two empirical studies of Americans’ attitudes about political impartiality in both K-12 and higher education.

How Does the American Public Assess Political Impartiality in Education? Evidence of Shared Values and Double-Standards from Two Experiments. 

According to a commonly held view, educational institutions have an obligation to political impartiality in teaching and other mission-critical conduct.
But little research has investigated what the American public thinks impartiality requires and whether Americans apply those requirements evenhandedly to co-partisans and political opponents alike. Especially as dueling accusations of indoctrination and political malfeasance have become a common feature of public discourse on education, understanding public attitudes about what constitutes legitimate and unbiased educational conduct is important for crafting theory and policy that can withstand scrutiny in a divided public.

In this colloquium, Eric Torres will present the results of two empirical studies of Americans’ attitudes about political impartiality in both K-12 and higher education (total n=2,037). He finds evidence of widespread support for political impartiality in principle, but the results of two experiments suggests that the application of those principles to discrete cases of educational conduct is affected by partisan favoritism, with partisans judging identical acts of political favoritism in educational contexts significantly more harshly when the beneficiaries are opposing partisans rather than co-partisans. He'll also discuss the implications of these results for research, policy, and educational practice. 

About the Speaker

Eric Torres is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism at Heterodox Academy.  Eric's work is broadly focused on understanding educational practices under conditions of pluralism and polarization. His current projects include empirical studies of how educators and the American public understand political impartiality, theoretical work on the challenges of defining and measuring indoctrination, and the identification of broadly defensible practices for teaching controversial issues.