I wonder if the story about the leftist stranglehold in universities is
similar to the story about incompetent public schools: we inveigh
against the mass (as indeed I do), but the one we happen to know
personally isn’t all that bad. In my case, I was recently talking to my
daughter, a sophomore at Middlebury, about her course in political
philosophy. She’s now two months into it, and she remarked that she
still doesn’t have any idea what her professor’s politics are. That’s
not easy for someone teaching political philosophy. In fact, I’m not
sure I could pull off that trick for two months myself. And then there
was the convocation for her freshman class last year, when Middlebury’s
President told his incoming students that true diversity in a college
isn’t measured by skin color, but by the richness and range of
intellectual perspectives. That was pretty cool too.
So that I’m not misunderstood, I agree that leftist domination in
universities is real in the social sciences and humanities, and it is
often a problem. We may, however, underestimate the prevalence of
professors who act in good faith to keep their politics from spilling
over into their classrooms. So I’m sharing some good news to go along
with the bad.