Ernesto Antunez/Staff Writer
It’s an open secret that liberalism and the orthodoxies which accompany it are ascendant everywhere in higher education. This is not the result of some impartial outcome in the “marketplace of ideas” as some on the Left would wish us to think, but a coordinated effort by leftist instructors repeatedly dunking their pupils in the holy water of liberalism.
By so doing they seek to create right (left?)-thinking citizens who have been properly “educated” and are now a world apart from the “uneducated” masses of conservative, reactionary and religious Middle America. The fact that liberal tenured professors holding a doctorate outnumber their conservative counterparts by 10 to 1 in top-tier liberal arts colleges, according to a 2018 study by Professor Mitchell Langbert, makes this process of indoctrination as disturbing to watch as it is easy to do.
As a result, any half-sober individual who spends considerable time inside a classroom will be bombarded by liberal platitudes and anti-conservative epithets from professors consisting of Trump bashing, internationalism, militant atheism, race baiting and other liberal ideas.
Resistance at any moment during this indoctrinating process is met with academic sanctions, classroom ostracism and the threatened prospect of professional rail-roading. The conservative, reactionary or religious position on any issue of consequence is by its very nature considered illegitimate and is never presented to the young student scholar except as gross caricatures designed to mock the right and pump up the left.
One simply has to look at how an issue of fierce contention such as gay marriage is presented. The liberal position is presented as a high-minded and noble attempt to extend civil rights to a beleagured minority, while the conservative position is presented as a homophobic conspiracy of closeted, self-loathing homosexuals who think the “gay” will spread like an out of control rainbow plague to straight couples and their children.
Rinse and repeat this false dichotomy for all other issues of controversy from guns to “hate” speech and beyond.
Unfortunately, as the overall educational competence among America’s youth continues declining, ideological fanaticism fed by this type of demonization continues increasing. Exhibit A would be the increasing number of student clubs of the Young “Democratic” Socialists of America sprouting up like poisonous mushrooms on American college campuses with a self-reported astonishing 280 percent increase in their number of active college chapters from 2016 to the end of 2018 alone.
All these disturbing developments do not bode well for those who treasure a truly liberal education in the ancient sense of the word that consists of academic freedom, the Socratic method, free and open inquiry and the accumulation and appreciation of knowledge for its own sake and on its own merits.
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