Diversity

My kids are still six years way from thinking about college. Thankfully.

Katherine Kersten isn't so lucky. She wrote this op-ed last week in the Strib:

Why does this academic imbalance matter? Today, most college professors encourage their students to view subjects like political science, sociology, economics and history through the ideological prism of the political left. They urge students to analyze American society through the lens of race, class and gender, and to adopt a reflexive skepticism about America's role in the world. The impact of ideological imbalance extends well beyond the classroom. At many campuses, for example, young people may find it difficult to recruit a faculty adviser for a prolife student organization, or arrange a lecture by a conservative political figure.

Where can college students go to hear the other half of the story? Generally, they've got to ferret it out on their own. To help my own young friends, I've purchased a new book by political commentator Dinesh D'Souza, called "Letters to a Young Conservative." In the early 1980s, D'Souza helped found the Dartmouth Review, a conservative student newspaper at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College. His slim new volume is a useful primer for students who are eager to sample the intellectual diversity they can't find in college classrooms.

I converted from McGovern liberalism to Reagan/Goldwater big-picture conservatism while I was in college, no thanks to most of the college's staff (but, of course, for my major advisor, the English department chairman, Dr. James Blake. Can you imagine being able to say "My English Department chairman catalyzed my switch to conservatism" these days, at anyplace this side of Hillsdale or Liberty Baptist?). Dinesh D'Souza wasn't available to me when I was in college (Jamestown College, class of '85). The books that started me rolling to the right were Modern Times by Paul Johnson, Republican Party Reptile by P.J. O'Rourke, 1984 by Orwell, and The Gulag by Solzhenitzyn (nope, believe it or not, no Ayn Rand).

Here's been my big question all these years - we know that the campus became liberalized, then radicalized, in the sixties. While much of the rest of America has swung right since then, the academy has remained steadfastly left of not only center, but of what passes for "left" anywhere else in American society, "left" of where the majority of liberals were even in the sixties and early seventies (when they first took over the Democrat party). So - when does the sixties generation die off? Who replaces them? Is the liberal academic complex self-perpetuating?

Posted by Mitch at November 25, 2002 02:44 PM