The Democrat's Dilemma: Leftist Hooey in Higher Education

InsideHigherEd reported a few days ago on recent paper from a conservative advocacy group titled "How Many Ward Churchills?", referring to the University of Colorado professor who basically said that the thousands of innocent victims of 9/11 got what was coming to them. The report suggested that the halls of academia are rife with similar folk.

Now, I generally don't give much credence to conservatives moaning about liberal bias in higher education, not because I don't accept the basic premise that the academy leans left but because I don't think it matters nearly as much as they think it does.

That said, there's a big, big difference between garden-variety liberalism and extreme Churchillian leftist nonsense. The unwillingness of Democrats to confront this distinction is a problem.

For example, a few years ago I presented at a conference in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. My subject was school funding, specifically how Illinois has among the largest funding gaps in the nation for school districts serving low-income and minority students, and how that was probably one of the reasons Illinois has the largest achievement gaps in the nation for the same kids. Lots of numbers and PowerPoint charts, followed by a few audience questions and polite applause.

Next up was a professor from DePaul. We had chatted briefly while waiting for our turn to go up on stage. I told her what I was going to say, she nodded and said she was going focus more on the "larger context." She was friendly but kind of reserved. Her speech went something like this:

"All those things the previous person said about funding inequities this and property tax rates that is all well and good, but it doesn't really matter, because as I tell my students, what we really need to address is capitalism and the racist, hegemonic patriarchy (which are, of course, the same thing), because none of this is going to change until the revolution comes. I want to be clear, just in case anyone working for Attorney General Ashcroft is in the room, that I'm not suggesting violence in the streets is needed to start that revolution, I'm not inciting anyone, but you know, that wouldn't be the worst thing." And so on and so forth in that vein for another half hour; I'm really not doing the sheer militant craziness of the speech justice.

I remember thinking "I didn't know people still said stuff like that," and then "man, her poor students."

To be sure, universities should be places of maximum diversity when it comes to different ways of seeing the world. They should support people with unpopular ideas, because the radical thinkers of today sometimes become the dominant paradigm-setters of tomorrow.

But what about the radical thinkers of yesterday, or decades ago, whose wacky ideas have been found wanting? Should college campuses be the last refuge of discredited Marxist thinking? Universities should be bastions of debate and thriving marketplaces of ideas, but at some point the market needs to be allowed to do what markets do--sort out ideas that exceed a certain threshold level of ridiculousness.

And Democrats and liberals have to admit that the population of college professors espousing such ideas is not evenly split between the right and the left. If they're not willing to say so, other people certainly will.