Inside the Ivory Tower

The odd world of academia, exposed:

Contrary to popular opinion, a surprising degree of free speech flourishes on today’s campuses. Trouble is, it flourishes mostly among faculty, and then only when one is willing to toe the party line, which is drawn somewhere to the left of Che Guevara. Faculty have few qualms about socio-political evangelism — which, put more bluntly, means they’re not sheepish about bullying any skeptical students into submission. I met a number of professors in political science, history, and the so-called “diversity disciplines” who upheld their private beliefs as empirical truths. Therefore, they felt entitled to grade based at least in part on the degree to which a given student accepted their wisdom. (After all, students who oppose affirmative action or U.S. “imperialism” can’t be thinking very clearly, can they?) The spirit of open inquiry that scholars like to tout in their self-congratulatory journals simply did not exist on the campuses where I worked. A student who tilted right, or failed to tilt visibly left, invited academic reprisals.

This climate of enforced homogeneity produces a striking intellectual torpor that’s most unbecoming in a supposed place of higher learning. It also produces grotesque intellectual defects akin to the physical defects one often finds among the chronically inbred. After decades of hearing nothing but their own ideas echoing back at them — of seldom having their logic challenged — many of my tenured colleagues had come to believe some pretty strange things: Suffice it to say that almost everything in American affairs was linked to some conspiracy theory, most of which were linked to the Oval Office (but only during Republican administrations).

The construction of a Left-wing echo chamber within the faculties of many American universities hasn't exactly served to sharpen the arguments of the advocates for a dying ideology, has it?

Let them wall themselves off and seek safe havens like the cockroaches they are. Let them call themselves "reality-based" from their little pockets of "People's Republics" where the Starbucks-per-capita rate is greater than one. Out in the real world, out in the sunlight, Americans are having a ball.

They might even be enjoying enough prosperity to send their kids to institutions outside the reeducation camps these sad little people have set up between protest marches.