Posted on 01/14/2005 5:48:21 AM PST by Millicent_Hornswaggle
Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no. Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest . . . affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.
The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.
The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of America's college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to mom and dad's own values.
But the left's long dominion over the university--the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed--is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and administrative offices, of course. It's coming from self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers.
There have always been conservative students on campus: More than a half-century has passed since a.....
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I bookmarked it and will read the whole thing later (my knee is killing me at the moment), but it looks really good, read about a quarter of it.
But to really break the left's monopoly on campus, the proffesoriate has to be eviscerated and that will take something along the lines of Horrowitz'es freedom of speech/though legislation.
Thanks for posting!
Bump to finish later.
What has always suprised me was the reasoning behind Conservative parents sending their children to liberal colleges.
Conservative bemoan the liberal slant of academia, but continue to put their children into an academic environment contrary to Conservative principles. These children of Conservative parents then graduate to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., but with a liberal mindset that contradicts their parent's values.
Is it really worth it in the long term?
Foreigners settle into American society, send their children to American schools, and, for the most part, don't see their children losing the values of their parents, yet Americans can't seen to grasp that very same idea.
Conservative American parents will allow their children to undergo liberal indoctrination in order for those children to get an education even if it poisons their children's lives. In this respect the Conervative students in today's colleges will most likely make better parents for their college age children because they know what academia is really like.
Many parents are wholly unaware of the extent of indoctrination that occurs. Also, many parents have already bought into the Leftist notion that they must be "friends" with their kids--not parents--and can't provide the guidance to prevent this.
When I left a large university for private industry a while ago, I was astonished to see how clueless most people are about this problem. I talked with the president of the board of trustees (a good friend) about this, and he said, "Write your thoughts down NOW...you'll soon forget it, too."
He was right. Soon, this was off my radar, and the full extent of the lunacy at the university was not apparent or at the front of my mind until I re-read what I'd written at that time.
Also, many alumni have and want this idyllic image of their alma mater, and can't believe it would be paying to have pedophiles as guest speakers, etc.
Indeed.
good read
I think you have to give the kids a little more credit. I went back to college late in life and had a chance to interact with younger students with my political and moral principles intact (i.e., I wasn't going to be swayed by the lib'ral bulls__t). I found that a lot of kids that were raised well and had solid life goals were smart enough to reject the lib'ral pap. That may be the reason that we're seeing this upsurge in college conservatives--parents know what's going on in colleges and prepare their kids for it. On the flip side, I found that those kids that were just going to college because "it was the thing to do" were more likely to fall into the "if it feels good do it" mentality of college lib'ralism, much the same way their non-college peers would fall into, say, a life drugs and crime--it's the easy thing to do.
A few years ago, for instance, Cornell's dean of students stood side by side with leftist students as they torched copies of the Cornell Review, which had run an article mocking Ebonics.
An official university spokesman defended the burning as "symbolic."
I'm glad I read this. It elevated my mood for the afternoon.
Really? The Asians that were at U of Chicago were just as much if not more liberal then their white counterparts.
This article also appears in the City Journal - an awesome magazine.
Oh my God, they actually cited my old column. I'm famous:)
Good stuff ~ Bump!
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