This letter was sent to me, in response to my recent LRC publication regarding my travails with the forces of political correctness at Loyola University New Orleans.

"As the father of a college-age daughter, I would not like to see her enrolled in an institution that engages in such witch hunts, and I'll wager there are a lot of other LRC-reading parents of college-age kids who feel the same way."

My response is as follows.

In a column that describes her fellow liberal Democrats as almost entirely clueless about the current political debate, Camille Paglia speculates that the education they received may be part of the reason:

.... Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. ....

David Horowitz in his recent book One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy (Crown Forum, 2009) provides yet another expose on a topic that virtually every college student in the U.S. is aware of – namely that today’s university faculty are overwhelming progressive in their political leanings and intolerant of students and faculty who are not.

The net effect of this near homogeneous philosophy is an almost impenetrable “group-think” in which divergent ideas from students and faculty are at a minimum discouraged and all too frequently castigated, thwarted, and ridiculed. Those who dare challenge this accepted academic orientation can find themselves punished, censored or even expelled or discharged.

Ron Lipsman wrote an excellent piece for the American Thinker, which describes the hostility of liberal/progressive academia to non-conforming ideas. I recommend that you read the entire article, but I was especially interested in Professor Lipsman’s “final observation”: 

    . . . The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters of the country beside academia — e.g., the mainstream media, major foundations, law schools and the trail lawyers they produce, public school teachers, the Democratic Party, even big corporations. But none of these can maintain the atmosphere as effortlessly as campus profs and administrators. Politicians encounter opposition from their constituents; the media from its readers, listeners and viewers; trail lawyers from their clients; and corporations from their stockholders and consumers. But the educational establishment-both higher and lower-encounters little resistance. The students are ignorant, the parents are cowed, and Boards of Regents are cowardly. The ivory tower is alive and well in America and the intellectual product it presents is completely one-sided. What a tragedy for our nation and especially for its youth.