| What I see -- a lot -- is that conservative kids learn their argument style from conservative talk radio. It sounds brilliant as long as the producers get to control things so Rush (or whomever) always has the last word, and no one gets to call him on his unsupported premises or lack of logic. That doesn't fly in an academic setting. Also, being rude and disruptive doesn't go down so well when you don't control the room. Conservative arguments can be made in a way that doesn't insult other people, but they often aren't.
I'm not saying that's Duerre's problem, but it is a common one.
I have never -- never -- seen an intelligent conservative get graded down for disagreeing with a professor. Liberal professors, because they are liberal, tend to like a variety of views, and because they are professors, they want their students to learn how to make convincing, nuanced, original arguments, not rote party-line regurgitations.
Also, "the best colleges reputation wise tend to be the most uniform in their liberal views"? Wow, there's a well-supported generalization. How about Stanford, home to the Hoover Institute? Or Princeton, where Bush's Fed Chairman lately taught, and Bernard Lewis and Cornel West could rub elbows at faculty meetings? How about the University of Chicago? Dartmouth, where the kids on the Dartmouth Review love to whine but seem to have a lot of company (and a lot of fun)? I don't know so much about the Yale faculty right now, but no one ever called Donald Kagan or Robin Winks "liberal". |