Matt Welch solicited some academic friends as to the nature of campuses these days. The stories he got back surprised him.
The nadir came when a secretary sent around one of those “please put a flag in your window” messages, kitschy to be sure but entirely harmless. She was then publicly accused of sending a threatening email. The accusation, made by the chair of the English dept, can only be described as hysterical. “Fly the flag or what?,” she asked, “Have my windows broken? Be lynched? As a person of color…etc.” It sickened me: these tenured, faux champions of the working class leveling absurd personal attacks against staff members for the crime of sentimental patriotism. I sent around a response that was as calm as I could manage, and made some friends and a few enemies. I’m afraid that the enemies will have a longer memory.
Send your kids to college and they’ll be indoctrinated into an ideology. Of course, it won’t all stick. And some of it is good old-fashioned liberal tolerance (it’s OK to be gay, date rape is bad, it’s valuable to study non-Western cultures). But some of it is intellectually and morally corrupt. I mean hell, I was a teen-age Maoist once, and on the whole it was good for my intellectual development. But the ideal of diversity on campus is, frankly, a joke. Diversity is a euphemism; there’s little interest or support for diversity of opinion.
When I was in college, apathy was the rule of thumb. For most folks, classes, beer, and (in my circles, at least) gaming were the topics of conversation. Politics were generally innocuous, usually liberal, and we had both Reagan and Anderson give speeches at our campus, with a minimum of picketing.
This sort of thing worries me. A lot.