Leftists utterly dominate American education through and through, and yet the little pockets of dissent drive them crazy. Crazy enough to say the kinds of things that Professor Stan Ridgley writes about in this Minding the Campus essay.
Here’s the situation. At Kern Community College in California, there’s a small group of faculty members who are dedicated to such old-fashioned academic values as freedom of speech and open inquiry. Having people like that around upsets some of the students, who accuse them of racism and of making them feel unsafe. How does the school’s leadership respond?
You know the answer. They respond by agreeing and saying that this small band should be taken to the slaughterhouse.
Ridgley writes, “This has become the modus operandi of paranoid critical racialists—to display angst, to issue vague charges of ‘racism,’ and to count on not answering the most basic of questions.”
Yes, and it works. No ones dares to tell the cry-bullies to grow up — or leave.
And why do those people think that the few dissidents must be purged? It’s because they’re afraid of ideas. They don’t know how to engage intellectually, so they want to get rid of anyone who disagrees.
Back to Ridgley: “Let’s sum up the situation: Students and a professor are given a forum to falsely accuse faculty of threats of ‘violence’ and ‘racism’ without a shred of proof, a member of the board of trustees accepts the twaddle, and then he actually threatens faculty and staff with killing. That the college must deal with this clueless and apparently murderous bureaucrat, as well as others who are more circumspect and close-lipped, is the real issue here.”