My first inkling of the problem arose on the opening day of class, when my brand-spanking-new first-year students condemned the credibility of a text because its author is a journalist and everyone knows journalists are biased.
I thought their evaluations of texts would become a bit more nuanced after we'd spent three weeks building their rhetorical analysis skills, so when we discussed a study conducted by credentialed professors and published in an academic journal (with supporting evidence, footnotes, and a lengthy Works Cited), I fully expected students to give the article an A+ for credibility.
But no. Several students (enough to make a noticeable dent in the discussion) averred that the article in question is not credible because the study addresses an issue related to gender but its authors are both women, who are obviously incapable of writing about gender without disqualifying bias.
So if women can't be trusted to write about gender without bias, who can? Men have gender too! Must we hand over all our gender-related research to genderless beings, maybe let the plankton take over the research labs? But wait, do plankton have gender? What about algae? Fungi? Squeegees? Would you trust a research article written by a squeegee? It would have to be a pretty incredible squeegee.
Some of my students seem to think that no sources are credible, that it's foolhardy to trust any source written by a human being capable of bias, that throwing the word "bias" out there trumps every other consideration. A bias against bias--how can I wipe that away? (Somebody hand me a squeegee!)
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