I use YouTube frequently via my phone, and that means that I have to sit through ads since there is no ad block for android. Lately I’ve been seeing ads for PragerU, a conservative digital media organization that uploads videos on political and social issues. One of their ads caught my attention; they claimed that conservatives were being discriminated against in college campuses. I’ve never been interested in clicking, or tapping, on ads before my YouTube videos, but this one got me curious.

I was taken to their YouTube page where I viewed their videos list, and I must say I wasn’t surprised by some of their videos. They had a “conservative student’s guide to survival” video, where they shared seven tips on how to function as a conservative on liberal campuses. Like their YouTube page, the idea that conservatives are being discriminated against- or that there is a liberal echo chamber in colleges and universities- is laughable. Instead of dismissing the situation as an echo chamber, maybe they should ask why the majority of professors and students lean left. Perhaps it’s because professionals within their respective fields find more evidence in support of liberal positions on issues than conservative ones. If this is the case, and it mostly is, then these professionals include it in their textbooks and curriculum. So when students enroll in a course, they are taught the standards of that course; and those standards happen to be liberal. To a conservative this is indoctrination, there are no conservative positions included in the material; only liberal positions. This conclusion doesn’t make any sense; any course that teaches what is supported by evidence is a liberal echo chamber in the eyes of a conservative.

Biologists teach evolution and not creationism, because one has a plethora of evidence to support it while the other has none. Do we say that biologists have a liberal bias? No, because evolution is objectively true whereas creationism is not. The goal is to teach what is part of reality, what is supported by evidence, not what is politically favorable. To quote Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well known liberal bias.”