English professor Heather Love only discovered that she was featured in a recent Wall Street Journal article when a colleague on an academic listserv alerted her to the fact.
"He wrote me and said, 'You might want to be aware of this piece about you,'" she said.
In the op-ed column, author Brian Anderson cited Love's courses at Penn as an example of "liberal bias" in higher education. The piece -- which was published in both the Journal and the City Journal magazine -- argued that conservatism was on the rise among college students.
"Want to take English lit at, say, Penn?" Anderson wrote in the Jan 14 column. "Freshmen take introductory classes like 'Secrecy and Sexuality in the Modern Novel,' taught by -- no joke -- Heather Love. ... Deconstructing Herman Melville and other dead white males, Dr. Love promises to uncover ... themes that seem to have zilch to do with English lit."
College junior Kathy Totoki, who is in Love's course, said the class is academic in nature.
"He makes it sound like we just go in there and talk about pornography," Totoki said. "Yes, those are the topics, but that's in a literary context."
Totoki added that the piece's accusations of liberal bias amongst faculty assumed students could not distinguish opinion from fact.
Anderson "makes it sound like we don't have minds to think for ourselves and formulate our opinions," she said.
College senior Stephanie Steward, the chairwoman of the Penn College Republicans, said that despite the University being known as a traditionally liberal school, conservatism is growing more popular here.
Steward was actually referenced in Anderson's article. She reported that the number of College Republicans at Penn had risen from 25 a couple years ago to its current 700-person membership.
"Penn is a model of what has been happening nationwide in terms of the great increase in ... conservative activism," Steward said.
Love said she thought the Penn student body was generally liberal, however.
"You can say there's a trend now; campus conservatives are on the rise," Love said. "In a sense that could be kind of wishful thinking."
Steward said she agreed with Anderson's point about liberal bias in the classroom.
"What really matters? Is it ethnic diversity or is it intellectual diversity?" Steward said. "I would argue it's far more important to have the latter."
"There's no concession [by liberal professors] that there's another side," Steward said. "It's not presented as 'this is my opinion.'"
Love said that political bias was an inevitable, and not necessarily a detrimental, part of education.
There is "no way to keep your political views completely out of the classroom," Love said. Curriculum "choices are always loaded, always, in a sense, political."
Despite Anderson's accusations that Love ignores many classic pieces of literature, the professor noted that her syllabus requires that students read several traditional texts. Students in the class read works by authors ranging from Oscar Wilde to Herman Melville.
The class "is actually very literary," Love said.
Love added that her classes on sexuality were inherently controversial, however.
"The readings that we do in [my classes] are highly political," Love said. "They are about making life better for women and [Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender] people. ... This is not a position you have to agree with."
Love also said that Anderson's argument was somewhat cliche.
"A lot of these debates feel really recycled and really stale," Love said of the column.
Critics of liberalism and liberal professors have "a desire to hold on to some trans-historical, universal standards in knowledge. ... That doesn't mean that we can't take on new issues, new approaches."
