I graduated from the University of Chicago - when I was there it still held very high standards but it still had its carefully nurtured quota of hard lefties - it has always been so. Example: the recent Alumni magazine included a 1946 (yes, that was 63 years ago) female graduate of the University raging on about those nasty old ‘teabaggers’ that pick on the big 0. She was apparently very familiar with the term in its crude colloquial sense.
From the general tone communicated in the Alumni magazine, my impression is that the University student body is desperately scrambling to join the Ivy League-rs (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc.) and the socialist wanna-bes at UC-Berkeley and Duke at the very bottom of the intellectual pile.
I hate to read about University of Chicago going downhill for the sake of political correctness. One could have hoped that there were a few, just a few, universities in the US that were purely academic in the finest sense. For whatever reason, in my mind UofC was the most truly intellectual campus in the US. So, I commend you for success in that rigorous environment.
(I still don’t know and don’t want to know the colloquial meaning of that term, just the hints are as much as I need to know)