The current brouhaha over comments made by Professor Steven Hayward on his blog brought to mind a relatively old (1991) quote from a well-known liberal attorney, Alan Dershowicz, who back then was so disturbed by the lack of respect for free speech in certain liberal circles he’s on record as saying: “Political correctness is the most serious issue on college campuses. We are tolerating, and teaching, intolerance and hypocrisy” (James Warren, “Drawing Laughs,” Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1991, section 5, p. 2).
Things didn’t change much from 1991-2005. Indeed, the intolerance of of the ever-so-trendy “politically correct” crowd just seemed to have gotten worse (power may have gone to their heads). That motivated a libertarian syndicated columnist named Nat Hentoff to pen a piece on Sept. 15, 2005 titled “College no place for closed minds“.
Some of the points he made: 1) Even some mainstream educational groups (which Hentoff lists) expressed concern about the widespread intolerance and hostility on many college campuses toward conservative speakers, ideas and values; 2) Liberal college professors outnumbered conservative professors by a 5-to-1 ratio; 3) In some classrooms on various college campus, “conservative students are intimidated into silence, ignored or occasionally ridiculed” by narrow-minded liberals; and 4) “indoctrination — instead of free inquiry — …characterizes much of higher education”.
According to an article in Washington Monthly magazine, “62.2 percent of professors self-identify as liberal, compared to 19.7 as conservative…9.4 percent of faculty members say they’re ‘extremely liberal'”.
And according to an article in the New York Times, “It’s certainly true that professors are a liberal lot…about half of the professors identified as liberal, as compared to just one in five Americans over all…[Among academic] social scientists, for example, there were 10 Democrats for every Republican…There’s no doubt that in terms of overall curricular content and campus culture, most colleges and universities do skew more to the left than to the right”.
Close-minded, intolerant, ignorant liberal bigots who believe it’s OK to discriminate against conservatives and conservative speech exist, and many of them are unfortunately found on college campuses, where they are using their positions of authority to try to insinuate their questionable values into their students. Hopefully students are aware of all the one-sided, liberal propaganda they are manipulatively being exposed to. But I fear they are not.
It would be nice to see students pushing for intellectual diversity on their campuses, and maybe even affirmative action for hiring a true minority on college campuses: conservative teachers. Until that happens, liberal college professors will feel free to continue to try to take advantage of their students. That needs to change.
Wayne Lela, Illinois
