Steven F. Hayward, political scientist, author, and intellectual bon vivant, recently spent the previous academic year at the University of Colorado at Boulder as the pioneering “visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy.” The goal of the privately funded project was to bring conservative ideas to Boulder (which he calls a bastion of “elite leftism”).

Hayward’s article about his experience, “Grievance School,” was published in the print version of National Review and is available online for a small fee. His amusing story documents, among other things, radical inanity at the school and his response. Specifically, the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women was brought in to investigate the philosophy department for being biased against women. Their “findings” led Hayward to defend the department in the Daily Camera, the local newspaper. (“Why go in for micro-aggression when you can offer full-tilt-boogie macro-aggression?“ he explains.)

So, he wrote that the committee “was guaranteed to produce a finding as predictable as the Salem Committee to Investigate Witchcraft in 1691….” That led to attacks on him, of course, and a searching analysis by his attackers of everything he had written elsewhere to try to find something they could use against him, which they finally did. (It was trivial.)

Hayward is not entirely negative about academia, just mostly. The message of his piece is that academia is divided into “the traditional university, which while mostly left-liberal, still resides on Planet Earth, and the grievance university, mired in the morass of postmodern obsession with oppression and privilege.”

He tips his hat to CU-Boulder for at least inviting him, and he appreciates the political science and environmental studies departments for letting him teach classes in their disciplines. All in all, the story is a good summary of what we face when we try to reform academia.