How a Benighted Conservative Was Turned into an Enlightened Liberal

Just in, this personal account:

ST. PAUL, MN—Explaining how the string of personal insults and sharply worded accusations caused him to reevaluate every one of his political leanings, former conservative Vincent Welsh recalled for reporters Friday the belittling tirade from a college student that brought him over to the left. “It was last October and I’d just mentioned my support for a Republican congressional candidate on Twitter when this 19-year-old responded by telling me I was an ignorant asshole who hated the poor and that I was everything that was wrong with the world, and it just completely opened my eyes to how incorrect my whole worldview was,” said Welsh, fondly recounting how the sophomore sociology major converted him to liberalism on the spot by calling him a hateful bigot and saying he was too much of a “brainwashed puppet” of corporate interests to know what was best for him, instantaneously invalidating the 56 years of individual thought and life experience that had led him to his previous political beliefs. “I remember how he said anyone who didn’t support Scandinavian-style social policies was nothing more than a greedy capitalist leech and I was just like, ‘Wow, yes, that makes total sense.’ And then when he called me a fascist piece of shit and condescendingly asked if I’d ever once looked up from my copy of Atlas Shrugged, that was the moment I saw what a complete fool I’d been and knew I had to reject all my political positions and adopt his ideology in total.” Welsh then expressed his deep gratitude that the young man had even stopped to direct the series of derogatory tweets at him in the first place, saying he would likely still be a “money-grubbing racist shithead who spends all day sucking the Koch brothers’ dicks” if not for the magnanimous individual.

Yes, we are sure this sort of consciousness raising calling into account of bad ideas has turned many people, especially conservative-leaning college students, into good progressives. After all, we found this in an eminent social science journal.

The Greatest Generation

The Plight of the Campus Religious Believer

From the Intercollegiate Review:

If you’re an orthodox believer at a mainstream college, you don’t need me to tell you that you feel like an oddball, maybe even besieged. Your professors and most of your peers would treat your most deeply held beliefs with condescension and probably horror, if they knew about them.

So what should you do about it?

If you had asked my advice even a few years ago, I would have told you to be the turd in the ­liberals’ punchbowl. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, I did everything in my power to challenge leftist orthodoxies. I saw offending liberals as a key public service, which I dubbed “insensitivity training.” I relied on, and fought for, the principle of free speech.

That’s long gone on campuses now.

My advice today? Grit your teeth, do your reading, make some friends, get your degree, and then make like Lot fleeing Sodom: never look back.

Sounds depressing, right? Well, I do have some good news, as you’ll see.

Big Mother Is Watching You

Colleges are much less tolerant than they were even back when I was in school. Instead of welcoming free, vigorous debate designed to prepare people for adulthood, many campuses are turning the classroom into a “safe space” where infantilized pseudo-victims can wallow in their phantom pains for four long, pricey years before the college dumps them into the real world and sends the bill. The tenets of your faith, if you stood up for them, might count as “microaggressions,” “trigger words,” or even “harassment.” Citing free speech won’t get you far on most campuses nowadays.

If your creed is anything like mine, it is by any contemporary secular standard “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “patriarchal,” “sexually repressive,” and opposed to “abortion rights.” There is no way to airbrush any orthodox mono­theist religion, especially biblical or ecclesial Christianity, to make it acceptable to secular progressives. It would take full-on plastic surgery, and you saw what that did to the Episcopal Church, Bruce Jenner, and every Jesuit college.

As someone who delighted in debating professors and students in and out of the classroom, it pains me to recommend a “covert-ops” approach. But the battlefield has shifted, and you are now deep behind enemy lines.

And what to do about this?

So keep your head down, and keep your faith. That last part can be difficult when peers and professors attack your religious beliefs as “retrograde” or “reactionary.” But you can do it. You can do it even if your campus ministry soft-pedals any supernatural aspect of your religion, privileging instead some social justice activism. If that’s the case, go find a local church and pray with the grown-ups at a faithful congregation. You may spot fellow students there. Befriend them.

You can also find like-minded students in organizations like the ISI-affiliated group on campus, Young Americans for Liberty, College Republicans, or your campus pro-life club. Maybe even a Greek organization, if those haven’t been banned from your campus. Their meetings could be a “safe space” for you.

It’s not quite as bad as this essay makes out, although anti-religious (or at least anti-Christian) intolerance can be pretty bad.

But:

Some institutions are better than others. A useful (but perhaps a bit dated) ranking of schools by religious commitment can be found here.

Sometimes the students are not as biased as the professors. At Marquette, for example, students apparently split about equally in voting for Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Mary Burke.

Some majors are better than others. Expect a lot of leftist indoctrination in the humanities, the social sciences (except economics and perhaps political science), communications and education. Other majors are better, although you will have to take some courses in those most biased departments.

Plot out your path carefully. You will indeed be in enemy territory.

Academic Yahoos: A Roundup

From Walter Williams in The Examiner:

Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are accused of setting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon, attended the University of Massachusetts. Maybe they hated our nation before college, but if you want lessons on hating America, college attendance might be a good start. Let’s look at it.

“We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.” That’s taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.

University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow preaches hate to his students in his regulation of elections and political finance class, recently telling them that Republicans are stupid, racist losers and that they are angry old white people. A few years ago, Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, “The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world.” Penn State University professor Matt Jordan compared supporters of the voter ID laws to the Ku Klux Klan. Professor Sharon Sweet, an algebra teacher at Brevard Community College, told her students to sign a pledge that read, “I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.” Fortunately, the college’s trustees fired her.

University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis tweeted, “I want (National Rifle Association executive vice president) Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” He asked, “Can (we) define NRA membership as dues contributing to a terrorist organization?” Here’s a sample of how Professor Loomis frequently expresses himself: “Motherf---ing f---heads f---ing f---.” Then there’s Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, “But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.” Professor Seidman worked for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. When he was sworn in as an officer of the court, I wonder what constitution he swore to uphold and defend.

Parents don’t have to wait for college admission for their youngsters to receive America-hating lessons. Scott Compton, an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., was put on administrative leave after he allegedly threw an American flag on the floor and stomped on it in front of his students. He has chosen to resign.

An Advanced Placement world geography teacher at Lumberton High School in Texas encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing and instructed them to refer to the 9/11 hijackers not as terrorists but as “freedom fighters.” They were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as genocide. John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, told Fox News that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.

In McAllen, Texas, teachers tried to force a teenager to sing the Mexican national anthem and recite Mexico’s pledge of allegiance. The teen refused, saying it was against her beliefs as an American. She was thrown out of the class and given a failing grade for that day’s assignment. Her father has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter against the McAllen Independent School District.

Investor’s Business Daily ran a story that shows student indoctrination is official union policy: “A New Low From The California Federation Of Teachers: Urine Indoctrination” (12/5/12). The union’s website has a cartoon narrated by leftist Hollywood actor Ed Asner. In tones used when reading to children, Asner says: “(Rich people) love their money more than anything in the whole world. ... Over time, rich people decided they weren’t rich enough, so they came up with ways to get richer.” The cartoon finishes its class warfare message by graphically depicting “the rich” urinating on the poor.

These people running our education system are destroying the minds and values of our young people, and we allow them to do it.

Of course, one could argue that these examples of outrageous indoctrination are atypical, and to an extent they are. But we have blogged about several examples nearly this bad at Marquette. Even an occasional example is an outcropping of a narrow, insular and intolerant culture among academics. When an entire subculture leans left, leftist extremism doesn’t seem that abnormal.

One could also argue that college professors (but not high school teachers) have academic freedom, and can say outrageous things. This, of course, is quite correct. But anybody has an equal right to hold such academics in contempt. Taxpayers have a right to vote against politicians who keep funding public universities at a high level, and parents have a right to look for a college for their kids from among the minority of institutions that actually have a diversity of opinion.

A good place to start is among Christian colleges, and not “Christian” colleges that, like Marquette, are only nominally Christian. There are a few that really are Christian. Those, ironically, would be more congenial to non-believers who are conservative or libertarian than the secular, politically correct places.

A Liberal Explains College Education