<p>Where does this “dominant liberal academic paradigm of the 80s” come from? I was around then, too. I don’t remember anyone saying anything even remotely nice about the Soviet Union, other than that post-Stalin it wasn’t necessarily “evil”, just relatively awful. No non-wackjob thought anything about the USSR had anything to do with collectivist nirvana. Ultraliberal academics even stopped calling themselves “Marxists” in the 1970s, most of them, and started using the term “Marxian”, to avoid any implication that their ideology had anything to do with what the Soviets thought. It was a given that Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin. If you were far left, you might argue that Thatcher and Reagan were almost as bad, but no one was apologizing for Stalin. (Maybe in the late '60s the Daily Worker still did that, but people laughed at it then, too.)</p>
<p>I believe you about the environmental debate, to some extent. The notion of using markets to restrain pollution was being bandied about in the late 70s lots of places, but the environmental left was resisting it.</p>
<p>Horowitz, of course, WAS the far left in the 1970s, and he DOES have an axe to grind. He’s like an ex-smoker who can’t shut up about how bad smoking is.</p>
<p>"that there exists among students an intolerance for non-liberal views. A college campus should be a place that tolerates different views if they are thought out and reasoned. That is just not always the case. "</p>
<p>Thanks for reporting your son’s experience, mimk9. I wonder if this is similar to students with one social style not tolerating students with a different social style-- for example, wealthy preppy students verbally abusing or ostracizing students with the wrong taste in clothing, hair and music (or being abused by them). A liberal student would probably have a rough time at a college where most students were conservative religious types who liked hunting and listening to Rush Limbaugh. Young adults haven’t all learned tolerance yet.</p>
<p>I know a woman who has three kids at Liberty University. She is thrilled with their experiences there and the kids love the school too. I think most LACs or mainstream schools would not have elicited the same reaction. Know someone else whose son is at Southeastern and that kid is making so much of his college experience there. Everyone I know who had a child at Grove City loves the school. There are conservative schools out there that people very much like. No reason to try to put a round peg in a square hole when there are plenty of round spots around.</p>
<p>JHS - let’s get real. I read with fascination Anne Appelbaum’s book about the Gulag (a very good best seller), and she exquisitely explains how the academic community’s repeated benign view of the Soviet Union has led not only to a warped and saccharin view of the Gulag, but also has failed the Russians as they try to move beyond a totalitarian state. And she quite rightly points out that is why an absolute atrocity like Chechnya received no real attention in the world at large or among the Russian intelligentsia. It should. </p>
<p>To be fair, and I grudgingly understand this, to some degree academia had to be accomodating and non-critical to the Soviet Union because doing so was necessary to get close enough to the regime to study it. But she also makes clear that a material part of the problem was an overly benign and naive view of the Soviet Union. The academics did like (if not outright admire) the collectivist ideal of the Soviet Union, and were in fact far from sufficiently objective and critical in their work. And many of these types exist today - a point which Applebaum also makes clear. </p>
<p>Of course, in these kinds of debates one always anticipates statements that she thinks this way because of her politics. But she is a reporter with an intimate understanding of the former Eastern bloc, and her book and research is based upon visits to the Gulag and the hapless zeks and their descendants - just the kind of unfortunate people that a truly liberal person should support, crushed as they were by the power of a ruthless state.</p>
<p>“No reason to try to put a round peg in a square hole when there are plenty of round spots around.”</p>
<p>I guess that is one point of view. There was discussion (on my husband’s part) when we were drawing up our list of schools of putting schools like Hillsdale on the list. My son did not want to apply to those kind of schools. He was used to a public school that was extremely diverse and he didn’t want to be in a more homogenous environment. He wanted to go to the best school academically that he could get into. That was what mattered to him. Once he had acceptances in hand, he visited the schools and he just really liked the school he ended up at. He felt very good about it and so did we. We were really impressed with the personal attention, the small classes, the terrific facilities, where the kids go after graduation and, so far, we have not been disappointed. My conservative husband was really hoping he’d pick this school because he felt we would get a lot for the money and that he’d get a good education (and he took the time to talk to professors at admit day to get a sense on this issue). He’s managed to meet some people with similar values and he’s met people with different values. Jesterbouy, I wouldn’t say he’s had “such difficulty”. He’s never once complained and we only talked about it because of this thread. So, would he have been more like everyone else in terms of his politics at a school like Hillsdale? Probably. Would he have been happier overall? I really don’t think so. I think after his public school experience and growing up in an urban city in a liberal state, he would have found it stifling. In a few years, he will either be in grad school or be in the real world. If he’s in grad school, he’ll want to be in the best program he can get into which will likely be at a liberal university. If he’s in the real world, it’s not going to be made up of people just like him. </p>
<p>The interview was a group process and the kind of group process where lots of things got discussed. Maybe he felt that not coming across as the typical student there would not serve him well in that process – I’m not sure.</p>
<p>hellojan - the problem with the Swarthmore professor’s statement is not with its veracity (or its lack thereof). It is with its assumption of moral superiority. Education necessarily involves inductive debate, preferably with evidence and data, and as so goes the evidence, so goes the element of persuasion. Viewed in this perspective, the professor’s statement is quite meaningless (no one is going to adjudicate how bad or good conservatisim is), and serves no academic purpose other than indoctrination or distraction. To be fair, I would say the same thing about a Chicago school economics professor who averred that neo-Keynesians are just wealth re-distributors who merely look out for the lazy and non-productive. The problem is that the balance of these kinds of silly statements lies very heavily on the left side of the political spectrum. What the academics do get is that their conduct really lacks self-discipline - discuss the politics outside of the classroom.</p>
<p>mam1959: I was not familiar with Applebaum’s book, and I just spent a few minutes perusing it. I think your characterization of it in #907 seems fair, as long as you take “benign” to mean “less horrible than the facts warrant” rather than “harmless”, but that is a far cry from saying “the dominant liberal academic paradigm of the 80’s was that Soviet Union was benign, a creature feeling its way to collectivist nirvana”. Applebaum certainly supports the proposition that the dominant liberal paradigm of the 80’s was to discount Solzhenitsyn’s thesis that the Gulag was part and parcel of Marxist-Leninist ideology, but although she comes down on Solzhenitsyn’s side she provides a good deal of evidence that could be used to support a different thesis, too, and she makes absolutely clear that the Soviet Union of the 80s WAS a good deal more benign than that of the Stalinist period.</p>
<p>I am also a little confused about your (her?) statement that Chechnya is ignored. I feel like I have a pretty high level of Chechnya consciousness, without ever actually having much emotional interest in it, because it gets reported on constantly. Maybe not in the conservative press, because they can’t figure out whom they hate more, Putin or the Islamists?</p>
<p>(A) Survey data is almost completely useless to prove these points, because depending on how the pollsters phrase the questions you can pretty much support any characterization of anything with polling data.</p>
<p>(B) It’s not surprising that you are going to get inconsistent results on “conservative” vs. “liberal”, because we really have at least seven or eight broad blocks that align themselves somewhat differently depending on the issues involved, including which representatives to elect when. (Which is how you get a state like Nevada with two Senators who act like they come from different planets.) There are lots of people opposed to abortion and gay marriage whose economic views are pure progressive, and of course lots of libertarians whose economic views are far right, people who are fundamentally isolationist and people who want to export democracy and free markets to the world, by force if necessary, and all those groups seem to vote for conservative candidates more often than not, albeit for different reasons. It’s the same on the other side, too, of course.</p>
<p>For me my conservative views are an expression of my deeply held faith as such I am oppose to homosexuality, abortion, stem cells and injection of moral decay. These especially homosexuality are not particularly popular at top schools to some extent, but that does not matter to me. I know that the only judge I should look to is God and I would readily express my views even if they are the minority.
I think people should be less concerned with how other people will respond to thier views and more concerned with how grounding they are in thier own beliefs. Because in all honesty the college environment is mostly academic without contentiousness (especially in the sciences my major :)), the only contention that could come up would be about evolution which is a moot point.
I guess it is the humanities students who are having these issues, but in this economy they probably have worse things to think about.</p>
<p>The left is nothing if not authoritarian; leftists insist only they are bright enough and morally pure enough to figure out how society ought to operate. Examples on this thread abound.</p>
<p>Hi everyone who has enjoyed this lively debate…I thought of all of you as I stepped onto campus the other day. My son and I were visiting a medium size Jesuit university and there was a large banner and picture announcing Gov. Mike Huckabee would be speaking on Health Care Ethics and Reform at the university later this month. I couldn’t help but be a bit shocked because someone like him would have never been invited to speak at most top LACs. (at least not without a major protest). I admit, it made me smile.</p>
<p>jhs - yes, it goes without saying that the Soviet Union of the 80’s was far less evil, so to speak than the Stalinist era. But that is not much of an accomplishment, is it? And I was in academia in the late 80’s - my comments are accurate. There was and is an automatic reflex (and rightly so) to condemn fascism and Hitler - that was far from the case with the Soviet Union. </p>
<p>I remember an appalling story to come out of Chernobyl - appalling in the disregard for human life and the depths of bureaucratic numbness to which the Soviet state had sunk. Within days of the disaster - first reported on by western European nations as they noticed the plume, it was discovered that our own defense forces had witnessed the accident on satellite, and we were appalled that the regime was permitting soccer matches a few miles from the field. Admiral Crowe called the Soviet embassy - hey - we cared about the Ukrainian people even if they did not - they never recognized the accident. The state was infallible, and life had to go on. I also remember chatting about just this at said top ranked university, and the collective shrugs I perceived were simply unreal. A lot of it was academic culture - Reagan took a strong position against the Soviet Union - and heck, Reagan liked markets - so he must have been wrong and criticism of the Soviet Union must have been misguided. The attitude was, heck, the Soviet Union has free health care, and we don’t, how can they be wrong? Can you imagine the reaction of the environmentalist and the left with a minor nuclear accident in this country? And to a state that permits recreational games to take place miles from the worst accident in history? The double standards are appalling.</p>
<p>I thought of this thread today when I saw the footage of Tom Tancredo giving a speech on illegal immigration (an invited guest at UNC) being shouted down by students ten minutes into his speech who were being egged on by the adults/instructors in the room. Windows were also broken in the chaos.</p>
<p>The same group that invited Tancredo had recently (in the last couple of months) also had invited liberal guests to speak with no problems on campus.</p>
<p>FWIW, the University issued an almost immediate apology, so at least that’s something.</p>
<p>The reported behavior of the instructors/professors is the most shocking to me.</p>
<p>Some would argue that most of academia is liberally biased not just LAC’s.</p>
<p>I can say after going to the UNC website, they appear to be taking swift and sure measures to identify, identify, and prosecute those involved in cooperation with campus and local law enforcement as appropriate. Also talking about expulsion or honor board review.
Never really have seen that after a similar “protest” at a LAC. Usually just a bunch of rationalizing.</p>
<p>The Chancellor and Board of Directors have issued about 4 stongly worded statements about it since Monday denouncing it. At least they are responding.</p>
<p>I think the OP was concerned about professors promoting liberal ideas, which sounds like it is equally likely at UNC as at an LAC if instructors egged on the UNC debacle as you stated. I think you make a good point about the perceived bias existing at most campuses, not just LACs.</p>
<p>It’s a long thread and yes, the original post was about LAC’s but it kind of digressed all across the board to not just LAC’s but all of higher ed back to LAC’s and how professors do or do not “offer” or encourage differing opinions and whether conservative opinions are valued in the dissent.</p>
<p>Never much concensus other than people asking for specific examples. This just struck me as a specific example. Tom Tancredo is the one that I heard state in an interview that the students were being egged on by staff and faculty in the room. He said he is used to being heckled for his views but it was the adult’s behavior that shocked him.</p>
<p>I guess we’ll see by the breadth and depth of the investigation and whether it involves just students or faculty as well.</p>