Liberal Professors Are Ruining US Colleges, Fueling the Rise of PC, by Chris Sweeney. An example of an isolated conservative student on today’s US university campus:
The freshman had his hesitations. “I am somewhat ‘in the closet,’” he emailed me from the safety of his dorm room. … While he was open to the idea of doing an interview, he worried about the consequences of revealing his true self. “I fear that many of my classmates would jump to conclusions about me,” he wrote, “should they all know I am a conservative.”
To be clear: This student … is not an alt-right provocateur railing against multiculturalism or a bombastic neocon. He is a skinny, stressed-out, 19-year-old Jewish kid from New Jersey who … prefers the Wall Street Journal to Breitbart.
As with so many college students, he’s wrestling with his political identity and trying to figure out where he stands on some of the biggest issues of today …. Exploring his conservative viewpoints, though, is proving difficult to do on campus: There’s the econ professor who cracks jokes about Republicans during lectures, Ben says, not to mention the orientation event during which the speaker understandably talked passionately about the importance of Black Lives Matter, but glossed over the social movement’s assertion that Israel is an apartheid state that engages in genocide …
All of this makes Ben feel like an outsider. The way he sees it, coming out politically a step to the right is the fastest route to social isolation on campus and the surest way to invite ridicule from his professors. So he bites his tongue in class and retreats to his dorm room to read and listen to conservative commentary alone. “I think it’s a shame,” he tells me. “A lot of people have negative preconceived notions about conservatives…we’re intolerant, racist, homophobic.” …
On college campuses, conservatives are dismissed using the worst stereotypes:
The definition of conservatism has never been more muddy — depending on who you ask, it can range from white nationalists espousing hate to moderates such as Governor Charlie Baker. At many of New England’s most prestigious colleges, political conservatism has been reduced to stereotypes, conflated with the alt-right and branded as being so wrongheaded that it’s not even worth considering, let alone hiring professors who embrace right-leaning ideas. …
Smith College professor James Miller says conservative ideas are presented as “outside the window of politically acceptable thought” at most colleges. …
College professors are more left-leaning than ever. The people teaching the kids at many of the best universities in the world’s leading nation are politically ever more narrow and extremist, which in turn is influencing politics though the West. If the kids are increasingly pressured into adopting an extreme ideology, what does that hold for the future of the West?
Last spring, Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, decided to run the numbers. …
At a time when Donald Trump is setting up camp inside the West Wing, our ivy-gilded campuses in the foothills of Vermont and the suburbs of Boston are emerging as some of the most contentious ideological beachheads in the country.
In response to Trump’s ascendance, campus politics are primed to swing even more to the left, potentially further alienating those college conservatives who are confounded by Trump and trying to find their political selves in today’s climate. These are the same students who may be susceptible to right-wing radicalization if we allow one of the most important forums for debate and intellectual exploration to devolve into just another partisan war zone. “New England’s college campuses,” Abrams warns, “are a powder keg ready to blow.” …
These colleges sound increasingly like Islamic madrassas, stuffing their students head’s full of unbalanced ideology rather than teaching them about the real world, and riling them up to go out and conquer the world. Just factories producing ideological warriors.
The modern, mainstream western culture that evolved out of the enlightenment and Christian Europe is in a culture war, assailed on one side by the PC crazies espousing postmodernism and on the other by Islam’s rigid seventh century Arabian culture.
So how did our colleges and universities become such a liberal monoculture—and why is it so pronounced in New England?… At the college and university level, jobs are rare and don’t turn over as frequently as in many other professions. That means professors from the Silent Generation—those born between 1925 and 1945, who likely cut their teeth as instructors on the campuses of the 1960s—began retiring in large numbers during the early 2000s. In turn, this opened the door to younger, more activist professors, who have since been tenured. …
In other words, the unfair nature of PC is at work — PC people only hire other PC people, so once they get a foothold in an organization, it eventually goes fully PC. In contrast, conservatives and mainstream people are usually happy hiring a balance and often opt for variety. But if you are of the left then it is your moral duty to only hire fellow lefties.
It’s no coincidence that the rise of political correctness on campus coincided with the sharp uptick in liberal professors, Abrams says: “It’s all part and parcel.”
And the world follows, sadly.
hat-tip byrmol
