In a September 26 speech at Georgetown University Law Center, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that freedom “of thought and speech on the American campus are under attack.” He claimed the American university “is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.” He said his Justice Department would be filing a “statement of interest” in a lawsuit brought against a Georgia college for allegedly infringing on an Evangelical Christian’s right to proselytize freely.
A recent Pew survey indicates that 58% of Republicans believe colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the United States. A major reason for this opinion is the belief that the university is a liberal hothouse breeding wild-eyed radicals and silencing conservative voices.
The College Republican National Committee’s website decries this as “liberal intolerance.” The blog offers several examples of student protesters demanding that the college bar conservatives, some with controversial views, not just from speaking, but also from the academic conversation. A few examples offered: Graduating seniors at Notre Dame walked out in protest as Vice President Mike Pence delivered their commencement address. Bethune-Cookman students yelled down Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as she attempted to deliver her address. Student protests devolved into violence when sociologist Charles Murray visited Middlebury College.
A closer look does not bear out the claim that Universities are petri dishes for liberal intolerance. Although incidents of campus protest have sparked a lot of interest, their number is quite small relative to the thousands of guests visiting college campuses, a great many of whom are establishment conservatives. Higher education in the United States is simply not the liberal monolith conservatives decry:
Professional schools — business and medical schools especially — show no leftward bias and sometimes even lean to the right. Hard scientists may be far more predisposed toward atheism than the general public, but their work has nothing at all to do with politics as typically defined. The social sciences lean more heavily toward the left, though economics departments often employ significant numbers of libertarians, while political science departments frequently include more than a handful of conservatives.
The Attorney General of the United States has now aimed the Justice Department’s civil rights division “toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants,” higher education administration in the United States is 86% white and 74% male. By comparison, senior-level executive positions in the private sector are 87% white, and 85% male. Congress is 81% male and 80% white. Liberal professors notwithstanding—the professorate is highly educated; why would it not be liberal?—the university in the United States is very much a part of the establishment.
It is also easy to see why students would take umbrage to “agitators” like Charles Murray and Richard Spencer. Murray, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, believes that “disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.” Spencer’s writing “was cited repeatedly in the 1,500-page manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.”
As with the President’s mischaracterization of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, it appears that you do not have to look far beneath the surface of this controversy to see angry white men. The current regime in the United States demonizes and scapegoats immigrants, people of color, and religions other than conservative Christianity in order to justify targeting those populations. In the same way, groups like the College Republicans decry “liberal intolerance,” even as Republican lawmakers attempt to end tenure, gut collective bargaining for faculty, and impose a partisan quota, designed to flood higher education with advocates for their brand of conservatism.
The cry of liberal intolerance is not about free speech on campus at all—that is a red herring. This is about white, Christian man sensing that his grasp on cultural hegemony and power is growing more tenuous. What is happening in higher education, just as it is in the culture at large, from the White House to the schoolhouse to healthcare and taxes, is that white man readjusting his grip, trying to hold on to his power.
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