Conservatives and Liberals
Christina Hoff Sommers, Author of books like Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys
, Says in a recent Christian Science Monitor Commentary that "As the 2000 election made plain, the United States is pretty evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. Yet conservative scholars have effectively been marginalized, silenced, and rendered invisible on most campuses."
I think there is an important idea in what she is writing. My experience is that discourse has been moved so far to the left at most universities that most arguments have two different positions, liberal and radical. Many times the people who are liberal are called fascists by the radicals. This distorts these arguments and the impact on the real world. Students at these schools get a view of the world that does not hold up in the real world. Worst is that anyone right of liberal is pushed out of the discussion. If the students here are the future leaders of America this causes lots of problems.
The worst thing is when people try to quash conservative speech in a university setting. There are lots of stories of entire runs of student newspapers being stolen because there is a commentary or story that upsets some campus interest group. Worse is a group pressuring an editor to resign over publishing something that is honest political debate. The campus interest groups are bullying people into not debating issues. That is the wrong thing to do.
A lot of people will say it does not matter that universities are liberal. That would be true if conservative thought was not all but stripped from the landscape. Universities should be safe havens for political and social thought from all sides of the spectrum. The current system is one of the current causes of the poor level of political dialog we currently get. Politicians on the right and left are moving so far away from each other. Maybe it would be better if these universities did not have cultures that were so anti-conservative.
, Says in a recent Christian Science Monitor Commentary that "As the 2000 election made plain, the United States is pretty evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. Yet conservative scholars have effectively been marginalized, silenced, and rendered invisible on most campuses."
I think there is an important idea in what she is writing. My experience is that discourse has been moved so far to the left at most universities that most arguments have two different positions, liberal and radical. Many times the people who are liberal are called fascists by the radicals. This distorts these arguments and the impact on the real world. Students at these schools get a view of the world that does not hold up in the real world. Worst is that anyone right of liberal is pushed out of the discussion. If the students here are the future leaders of America this causes lots of problems.
The worst thing is when people try to quash conservative speech in a university setting. There are lots of stories of entire runs of student newspapers being stolen because there is a commentary or story that upsets some campus interest group. Worse is a group pressuring an editor to resign over publishing something that is honest political debate. The campus interest groups are bullying people into not debating issues. That is the wrong thing to do.
A lot of people will say it does not matter that universities are liberal. That would be true if conservative thought was not all but stripped from the landscape. Universities should be safe havens for political and social thought from all sides of the spectrum. The current system is one of the current causes of the poor level of political dialog we currently get. Politicians on the right and left are moving so far away from each other. Maybe it would be better if these universities did not have cultures that were so anti-conservative.
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