Campus Clowns

I just ripped through Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons over the past few days. It's an excellent read (I am rarely able to finish a book of 600+ pages this quickly), and speaks volumes about our campuses. It was a dishearteningly accurate portrait of the small private school I went to twenty years ago ("Catholic," no less!), with the addition of a much more powerful sports team and far more overtly biased professors.

And that last bit gets to the main point of this rant. Here's a passage from Wolfe:

But how could the rest of them sit there and just listen to this PC s**t and not say anything? F**king sheep... they just swallow the sheep s**t he gives them and regurgitate it every time he asks a question. If that's all you do, it doesn't matter whether you believe it yourself or not. It ends up being the only "proper" s**t to say, and so you keep on saying it because why not be proper and not the kind of person you can't invite anywhere because he might introduce a fart into a proper conversation.

The reality of American campus intolerance for any viewpoint but the left-liberal orthodoxy was covered very nicely in the Dec. 4 issue of The Economist. (Isn't it sad, by the way, that it takes a British publication finally to address this sickening reality, which has previously only been heard within conservative opinion circles? The American MSM has been ignoring it for decades.) Here's a letter to the editor responding the the article:

SIR -- Your call for greater political diversity in academia is reasonable and desirable. But it would require conservative intellectuals to dissociate themselves from their brethren who deny evolution, global warming and the value of stem-cell research, while promoting homophobia and the rest of the dreary litany of popular but ludicrous conservative causes. The political imbalance in academia derives not from a leftist cabal but the intellectual indefensibility and moral bankruptcy of so many conservative notions, which taint those that may be worth discussing.

John Payne
Los Angeles

Get it? The liberal establishment admits it's cocooned in an academic world of "free inquiry" that currently allows only left-wing thought. But it welcomes conservative opinion, just so long as it unerringly echoes left-wing opinion, challenges no left-wing assumptions, and creates no discomfort for those on the left! Because, it's obvious, any concept that would make a liberal uncomfortable or might make him actually think about the drivel he's spouting is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt.

How do you caricature an intellectually insecure but nonetheless oh-so-smug "thinker" like Mr. John Payne?

I shouldn't paint the left with such a broad brush, of course. The always thought-provoking Nat Hentoff (who I've now added as our first opposite-side viewpoint link at right) of The Village Voice has been covering the shenanigans of this sort within the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University.

UPDATE 1/2/05 -- Here's an excellent article by John Leo in US News & World Report about Wesleyan University, which sounds as though it may have been the model for Wolfe's fictional Dupont U.