A reader from Canada wrote to me with some comments on my Clarion Call piece yesterday. His note also skewers the Free Exchange assertion that the idea of faculty indoctrination is imaginary:

I read with interest your June 16 article on conformity in higher education and couldn’t agree more: as a former graduate student at an otherwise nondescript Canadian school (University of Western Ontario) I discovered early on that there was a full-court press present that essentially demanded that students act and think as their liberal professors acted and thought; if you elected not to buy into this blinkered mind-set, you faced various complications — icy relations with faculty members, difficulties with uncooperative supervisors — that could derail your future hopes and aspirations. Furthermore, everything you said about the tendency for academics to perpetuate certain views, certain ideologies and (in my experiences) the hiring of certain groups is absolutely true: at UWO’s women’s “studies” department, the faculty is overwhelmingly white, female, embittered and left of center — even though the department has now been around for 22 years. It’s sad, but one of the most close-minded environments you will ever encounter is a typical social sciences department on a Canadian university campus: Here, you get the obligatory steady diet of anti-male, anti-American, anti-Western, “anti-patriachy,” and anti-capitalist (as well as anti-globalization) nonsense. This might explain, ultimately, why a university social sciences degree at your typical Canadian university is scarcely worth the paper it’s printed on. In any case, thanks for a thoughtful article.
Sincerely,
Blaine Hislop