Lofty image, gutter reality
Those of you that know B2 have heard a decades-long ranting about the ideological monopoly that pervades America's university system. My friends and I, entering university as military veterans, experienced it. We vocalized our points of view with professors who zealously spouted leftist distortions, professors quite used to student acquiescence and classroom audiences full of sponges.
Our grades sometimes suffered but strenuous argument and threats of administrative review usually corrected the bias. We were shunned by certain groups on campus yet reveled in the fact that was all those pussies could ever do to us. If the situation wasn't so tragic it would have been humorous. We first observed and then provided protection as one prominent conservative speaker after another was protested or assaulted on campus. Such despicable tactics were never applied to leftist speakers. Never.
More biased than ever
That was then, this is now, fast-forwarded 30 years. Although college billboards have changed, the featured movie has not - except in one crucial aspect. American universities today are more profoundly leftist than at any time in our nation's history. Don't believe me? Then perhaps you will believe the professors themselves. Robert Lichter, professor of communications at George Mason University and contributing author of a recent nationwide university study, states that his group's research confirms this.
"This is the richest lore of information on faculty ideology in 20 years," affirms Professor Lichter, "And this is the first study that statistically proves bias against conservatives in the hiring and promotion of faculty members."
Take a moment and read that again. The survey, published this March, found that 72 percent of faculty members at American universities describe themselves as liberal. The proportion goes up to 87 percent on so-called elite campuses, where only 13 percent of the professors are conservative. When subjects are factored by themselves, the disparity is higher. In English literature, for example, 88 percent of the professors are liberals; only three percent are conservative.
Corrupt liberal ideology and censorship
According to columnist Suzanne Fields, Raymond Aron, a French intellectual and contemporary of John Paul Sartre, never received the attention he deserved for inspiring a counterargument to the corrupt liberal ideology that dominates the campus today. He never will, because his thoughts run contrary to today's university dogma. In his book, "The Opium of the Intellectuals," he trained his considerable powers of reasoning on what was happening at the university, the savaging of ideals in the name of a false progressivism, tolerating only ideas that fit into "the proper doctrines." This lopsided distortion is perilous to reasonable thought and scholarly debate because students without any consequential life experience by definition are so incredibly predisposed to becoming intellectual sheep.
The findings, based on data from the 1999 North American Academic Study Survey, shreds and makes a mockery of the liberal mantra for diversity on campus. There is no inclusion for those with differing opinions, and the greatest shortages on American campuses are those of tolerance, scholarly ideals, and objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Feel free to read the PDF document at your leisure, but not if you care or upset easily.