Thomas Sowell writes about the absurd leftist bent in universities and colleges. As the sensible people on the right already know of course, it starts much earlier than that in the U.S. but more so in Canada—in grade schools—and it is already fully developed in high schools, with the students churning out leftist essays and viewpoints to the teachers’ delight. In Canada, I can attest to the fact that many of the teachers are nothing short of Marxists, as are the unions that control them and fund election campaigns of Marxist school board nominees and other political positions.
And when the socialists in Liberal Land Ottawa get done (actually I hardly think they’ll pack up and stop here), there’ll be a socialist state-run daycare program to get it done even earlier. They’re modeling it on Canada’s brilliant state-run health care system, so you know it will be good. Watch for ads on state-run media.
[…] Even though the word “diversity” has become a mantra on the left, there is no such drive for intellectual diversity in bastions of the left, such as academia or the mainstream media.
In recent years, the liberal media have at least added some token conservatives, but our colleges and universities are content with whole departments consisting solely of people ranging from the left to the far left. In academia, “diversity” in practice too often means simply white leftists, black leftists, female leftists and Hispanic leftists.
Perhaps it was the remarkable popularity of conservative talk radio and the meteoric rise of the Fox News channel that led liberal TV networks to begin adding some conservatives to their lineups. No such competitive pressures operate in academia.
There are a few good small conservative colleges like Hillsdale or Grove City, but Ivy League schools have no conservative rivals of comparable size and prominence, and neither do most state universities.
A student can spend four years at many colleges and universities and graduate with no real awareness of any other viewpoints than those on the left.
College and university faculties do not simply happen to be leftist. Too often ideological questions are asked at faculty job interviews and ideological litmus tests are applied in hiring.
One reason for the prominence of conservative think tanks is that so many top scholars who are not leftists do not find a home in academia and go to work for think tanks instead.
Not even visiting speakers with a conservative viewpoint are tolerated on many campuses. It seems incredible that there would be fears that a one-hour lecture would undo years of indoctrination. But perhaps it is just sheer intolerance that creates hostility to anyone expressing ideas contrary to the prevailing notions of the left.
Students often report that their professors react against them for stating a viewpoint different from the prevailing orthodoxy of the left. They can be ridiculed in class discussions or given low grades on exams.
Dartmouth College has been carrying on a running battle with the conservative student newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, from the moment it was founded many years ago. On some campuses, conservative student newspapers are destroyed by leftist students or even burned publicly, with little or no effort by the college administration to maintain freedom of speech. […]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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