The Real Problem with Universities
It’s fairly fashionable in conservative circles these days to poke fun at the average American student. Democrats have made token efforts to push back against this, but it’s so easy to mock universities in the current climate that a serious defense of campus behavior is bound to backfire.
Before the ink is dry on whatever latest story is published about some collegiate temper tantrum, another bout of hysteria follows right on its heels.
Call them snowflakes for getting upset over Halloween costumes, and they’ll prove your point for you the next day by claiming that support for a Republican candidate constitutes intimidation and should be prohibited. Descriptions of speakers being barred from some campus or other for the crime of insufficient progressivism are now part of the daily fare. It’s a gift that just keeps on giving.
Go to any conservative website, and you will find reports about this issue. At the time of writing, right-wing sites Breitbart and The Daily Caller are both running a story about how students at the Claremont McKenna Colleges declared the concept of objective truth to be “white supremacy” and a “means of silencing oppressed peoples.” Apparently, this is how they rationalized shouting at a speaker they didn’t like until she was unable to continue with her presentation.
The Daily Wire, a news site run by conservative Ben Shapiro (who has had his planned engagements at universities cancelled three times in the past two years due to protests, according to free speech advocacy group FIRE), currently has two pieces decrying the situation.
The first deals with a high school student whose article questioning the utility of “safe spaces” was deemed by the faculty to be “’too harsh’ for some students to read”, and therefore censured.
The other includes details of a study from 2016 which found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among university professors is now nearly 12 to 1 in top fields. Twelve. To. One. Of those surveyed, a whopping 3,623 were Democrats, compared with just 314 Republicans.
Some people might not find that figure surprising. Universities have never been thought of as bastions of conservative ideology. But the scale is new. As recently as a decade ago, about 16% of university faculty described themselves as conservatives. Less than 9% do now.
It may be an open question what exactly has brought about such left-leaning whiplash, but the effect is sure to be self-reinforcing. Teenagers are the ones throwing hissy fits, but it’s the adults in the room who are letting it happen. It’s impossible to believe that the stewards of higher education would allow this nonsense to continue if they didn’t share – or indeed actively cultivate – the opinions of the students they teach.
This is where the fault actually lies. Not with the 18 year-old who’s still learning how to do his own laundry, but with the grey-haired professor who should know better and with the university administrations that continue to permit such one-dimensional patterns of thought.
Irresistible as it may be to heap scorn on pampered and insulated students, they are just students. And their teachers are failing them. Just as they’re failing the rest of us by churning out these fragile creatures into society. As usual, the philosophy of Willy Wonka’s Oompa Loompas holds up – when you’ve got a brat, blame the people raising him.
