There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail. Because conservative students do not take over buildings or drown others out with their shouting, instructors feel free to mock conservatives in the classroom, and administrators pay scant attention when their posters are torn down or their sensibilities offended. As a tenured professor who does not decline the label conservative, I benefit from this imbalance by getting to know some of the feistiest students on campus. But these students need and deserve every encouragement from outside their closed and claustrophobic environs. So far the university culture has not been able to destroy the two-party system, but its influence on the current administration in Washington gives some sense of what may lie ahead unless small d democrats—which these days means mostly conservatives—begin to take back the campus. Through patient but persistent means, they ought to help students introduce speakers, debates, demands for courses and all the intellectual firepower they can muster in favor of American exceptionalism, the moral advantages of a free economy and the need to protect democracy from enemies we are not afraid to name. ~ Professor Ruth Wisse, Harvard University This is a bold, well-written piece from a professor at Harvard University, attacking the closing of the collegiate mind occurring at campuses across the country.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 12:17:03 +0000
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