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July 24, 2022

If you have been paying any attention at all to academia in this country, you know it has entered a dark age, neglecting what my alma mater once described as its function: A place for the sifting and winnowing of ideas. Today’s academic “marketplace” increasingly sells only one product, drives others from the agora with a variety of bullying actions, and threatens both the sellers and purchasers into silence about alternate products.

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Here’s an eye-opener to illustrate the extent of the assault on free speech and free thought.

We are entering a future where blacklisting, censorship, and the abuse of power will become the norm, because apparently the new generation thinks such things are always justified, if they have been offended in any way. From a recent poll of 2,000 students at 130 colleges: In one eye-opening finding, 74 percent of undergrads endorse the view that a professor who says “something that students find offensive” should be reported to the university. By a majority almost as lopsided, 65 percent believe that a fellow student who says something they consider offensive should be turned in. That informers’ mindset is especially pronounced among students who identify themselves as politically liberal, fully 85 percent of whom would report a professor who offends them. But even among self-identified conservatives, a solid majority, 56 percent, are of the same mindset. 

The consequences of this are far reaching. After detailing a number of outrageous campus actions, Heather Mac Donald contends the deleterious effect on society. 

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Every year, thousands of college students graduate and carry into society the same megalomaniacal confidence in their own righteousness that has turned campuses into zones of conformity. Those graduates regard any disagreement with their own political outlook as a manifestation of “hate,” and as such, fair game for suppression. Democratic politicians and the mainstream media have adopted the same tactic, defining political disagreement as “hate” rather than the product of a good-faith difference in world view. Any college presidents not already committed to the premises of the victim revolution should follow the lead of Robbins, Yager, and, before them, the University of Chicago’s Robert Zimmer. The preservation of our Enlightenment culture of reason and violence-free discourse rests on their shoulders. 

There are a variety of explanations for this shuttering of the academic thought marketplace, not the least of which is the hiring policies which have excluded from the professional ranks those with views in conflict with the left-wing orthodoxy. Still, I find Camille Paglia’s explanation compelling.

Today’s campus political correctness can ultimately be traced to the way those new programs, including African American and native American studies, were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact… For every new department or program added to the U.S. curriculum, there should have been a central shared training track, introducing students to the methodology of research and historiography, based in logic and reasoning and the rigorous testing of conclusions based on evidence. Neglect of that crucial training has meant that too many college teachers, then and now, lack even the most superficial awareness of their own assumptions and biases. Working on campus only with the like-minded, they treat dissent as a mortal offense that must be suppressed, because it threatens their entire career history and world-view. The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s.

Because of the failure of American colleges and universities to seek and support ideological diversity on their campuses, the humanities faculties have trended so far toward liberal Democrats (among whom I number myself) that they often seem naively unaware that any other beliefs are possible or credible. 

She opposes the notion that we should make life “easy” for students. Intellectual life is confrontational, challenging, and often uncomfortable, and students should be taught to face that. 

Is it possible to reverse this noxious trend? FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) works hard to this end. Alums can withhold contributions. Trustees could speak out against it, but this doesn’t seem to be the usual case — most seem elected to churn out more contributions rather than exercise reasonable oversight of college policies on things like this.