Regressive Leftism: The Plague of Academia

     Academia has long been a bastion of liberal ideology where the agenda of the far left thrives in the hearts and minds of students everywhere and effectuates itself through the desire to unilaterally save the world and everyone who inhabits it. This bleeding heart mindset, however, while brazenly naive, does not a plague make. The reasoning upon which leftism has become a plague on academia lies not in the fact that leftist thinking exists in the academic realm, nor in the question of whether it is unerring, but in the reality that it dominates academia, silencing every other ideological category and leaving much to be desired in terms of intellectual diversity. Currently, liberal or far left professors make up 60% of university faculty nationwide while only 12% of professors identify as conservative or far right, despite the fact that conservatives outweigh liberals by 14% amongst the general population. There are various theories concerning why this may be, and of course perfect ideological balance is almost impossible to achieve in any industry, especially one as politicized as education, but far too many people ignore the actualized effects of such an imbalance.

 

       As a rising senior at American University, I have personally experienced the educational deficit created by radical leftist professors, nowhere more noticeable than in my past sociology classes which I have taken as electives outside of my interdisciplinary major of  Communications,  Economics, Legal institutions, and Government. Students in these classes are taught and encouraged by professors to unconstructively criticize conservative ideals through nothing more than the use of ad hominem attacks and vitriol. In my experience, this includes incidents of telling conservatives in class that their support of capitalism is “trash” and shouting profanities at those who are pro-life. All of this occurs while professors routinely standby, sometimes even joining in on the verbal attacks. Because they make up such a large amount of the faculty population, leftist professors often feel empowered to push their ideas on students, teaching them not how to think, but what to think. This emboldened ego of faculty can even result in the docking of students’ grades should they dare disagree with a professor’s opinion or challenge their perspective. The contempt that non-liberals face every time they step foot into a classroom often has a chilling effect on their ability and desire to express their ideas, leading to self-censorship and a homogeneous academic setting devoid of true diversity. Of course, careful analysis and criticism of all ideas is imperative if we are to reach the pinnacle of our intellectual pursuit as students, but doing it in such a way that it is bereft of any educational benefit is harmful to the academic process which is intended  to strive for truth, not subjective degradation of any ideas opposed to your own.

 

      Even worse than the tolerance of baseless verbal attacks on conservatives is the dogmatically presented agenda of the left being pushed on students from the day they step onto campus. Long dispelled myths such as the wage gap and the idea that “1 in 5 women will be raped in college”  are taught as incontrovertible truth and any attempt at questioning the validity of these figures is met with disdain and mocking. In this way, conservative students, who know these notions to be false, face a reality of being forced to regurgitate notorious lies for the sake of a grade while being punished for seeking truth. University is difficult enough without having to participate in Orwellian doublethink while navigating the complex academic and social structures of the collegiate process. Moreover, universities are now trending towards making this grim reality compulsory for all members of the community. At some schools such as American University, students are forced to attend welcome week seminars where they are indoctrinated into leftist culture by being made to spend precious academic time learning about transgender pronouns and sexuality. In fact, American University has for some time been revising its already extensive general education requirements so that students will be forced to take classes on oppression and “social issues” in order to graduate. These classes are centered around the notion that society is stratified into various classes based off of one’s level of oppression and will only serve as a divisive tool to reinforce leftist cultural ideals. Where it was once a student’s choice if they enrolled in subjective, blatantly leftist classes, the school is now forcibly putting conservative students in a curriculum which paints them as intrinsically cruel and leaves them susceptible to inexorable harassment by faculty and students. It was at one point questionable whether the amount of liberal faculty led to leftist indoctrination, but it is now objectively clear that either way, the left has succeeded in its goal of implementing its ideology into universities throughout the country.   

Pictured: Presentation at Towson University proclaiming that “White People are a Plague to the Planet.” These sorts of revolting, bigoted proclamations against white people and those with “privilege” are the norm in classrooms across the nation.       

     

  In classes nationwide, the free market of ideas, a system which has produced the best and brightest that humankind has to offer, is being replaced with an authoritative intellectual economy where leftist ideas, even when empirically proven to be wrong, are proclaimed to be superior. This academic structure is not only detrimental to conservative students who are disparaged every time they open their mouths, but it’s a disservice to liberal students as well. If one is in an academic setting where liberal ideas are always deemed correct no matter what level of criticism they face, students are not pushed to research or challenge their ideas and they are taught that when proven wrong, it is proper to resort to name calling and tantrum throwing as a defense. Socrates’ timeless quote that,“the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing” falls on deaf ears throughout university campuses across the nation. The students produced by liberal professors in certain fields can not contemplate the notion that they may be wrong and that perhaps those opposed to their ideas are not so because they are racist, homophobic, transphobic bigots, but perhaps because they have proof to the contrary. This environment of shouting down anyone who disagrees with the leftist agenda stunts all students’ educational development, which is an absolute shame for everyone, conservative or liberal.

        The result of leftist indoctrination in universities nationwide is not just academic, it’s social as well. The exclusionary rhetoric by leftist professors plays out on campuses in the form of not only verbal attacks, but physical violence against conservatives and anyone who does not espouse leftist ideology or bow to the will of every blue-haired, septum ring donning social justice warrior with whom they cross paths. The issue with authoritative figures teaching students that there is a hierarchy of privilege, with “White, cis-hetero males” at the top and everyone falling below them, is that students who are “disadvantaged” according to this theory, begin to assume that those above them owe them something to make up for the assumed injustices they face. This entitlement soon turns into the willingness to take what they believe they are owed, no matter the means. I have witnessed this occur multiple times, and in fact, I myself have been the victim of it. The day that Milo Yiannopoulos, a vocal anti-feminist and supporter of cultural libertarianism, gave a lecture at my university, friends of mine, as well as Washington Examiner reporter Ashe Schow were threatened by an American University faculty member with police action simply for reporting on the event. During the planned protest outside of Milo Yiannopoulos’ lecture, a guest of Milo’s was assaulted for taking a picture of the protest while the leftist protesters called for the recently assaulted man to be forcibly removed from the event. No one came to the aid of the man because in the world of the regressive left, assault, sexual or otherwise, is never the victim’s fault unless of course the victim is conservative in which case they deserved it for having the “wrong” opinions.

 

Pictured above: A protester erroneously claiming that Milo calls for his death and Milo’s guest being assaulted at American University. The constant demonization of conservatives leads to violence against them being justified by the left on campuses.

     

    Earlier that same day, a transgender social justice warrior whom I had never met before publicly threatened to maim me if I continued espousing or being vocal about my conservative beliefs. Naturally as a result of this, I filed a student conduct report with the Dean; a report which my university never followed up on and is now claiming that it never received. When at a liberal boarding school, where I was one of two conservatives on campus, I was hospitalized by a liberal male student who, moments before assaulting me, claimed that because I was a conservative, I must hate gay people and that he didn’t tolerate those who hated gays. For any other identity reasoning besides the fact that I was a conservative, this would have been treated with the severity of a hate crime by the school, but because conservatives are quite literally demonized by the left, the student was only given two days in school suspension for the assault and the administration failed to contact my mother letting her know that her, at the time, minor child had been attacked. Some conservatives, such as Tom Ciccotta, former junior class president of Bucknell University, are deprived of their well-earned positions within student government and other offices for their ideological beliefs. These odious actions are a part of the de facto educational experience for conservatives across the nation and in many ways are supported directly by the actions and inaction of the administration. Conservative students are regularly slandered, threatened, and attacked on campuses and nothing is done about it until there is such outcry that it can no longer be completely ignored.

 

University of Missouri professor, Melissa Click calls for force to be used against student journalists covering a leftist protest. What did the students do to deserve this? According to Click, by covering the protest, they were invading the protestors’ “safe space.”

     

    The mindset which allows such heinous behavior towards conservatives on campus is the same mindset which enables women such as Emma Sulkowicz of Columbia University, Jackie Coakley of UVA and Crystal Mangum of the Duke lacrosse scandal to lie about being raped, purposely ruining the lives of five innocent men. The culture on university campuses is one which facilitates and condones almost any behavior so long as it is in the name of “social justice”. Attacking conservatives and lying about rape are just two examples, among many, of conduct which is given a pass simply because the ends always justify the means to the regressive left. The narrative becomes “it’s okay that she lied about being raped because it started a necessary conversation on campus about ‘rape culture’”, and this type of justification extends outwards onto all other liberal wrongdoings on campus. All actions are validated so long as they were committed in the name of leftist ideology. Unfortunately, the sort of rabid behavior we see from the left at universities is no longer surprising to most people. It is far too commonplace and far too institutionalized to be considered unforeseen.  

 

       College campuses are becoming settings where a student’s mental “safe space”, and the right to not be offended by competing ideas, is privileged over the genuine pursuit of knowledge. Students are often required to preface statements with explicit “trigger warnings”, telling the class if what they’re about to say has the slightest chance of being not only offensive, but in any way reminiscent of any other student’s negative past experiences. This absurd practice carries with it the expectation to self bowdlerize and limits the possibility of honest academic analysis. But trigger warnings did not appear in classrooms over night, they have been cultivated by the pampering of entitled millennials who, unlike previous generations, were taught that their feelings mattered more than facts. These children, who are used to receiving awards just for participating and have not been required to earn their praise, are now college-aged adults who have in no way developed the emotional maturity to comprehend the fact that they are not all exceptional just by virtue of their existence and that their opinions do not deserve special treatment. This view that their beliefs intrinsically warrant a pedestal leads these students to genuinely believe that they have an inalienable right to not be offended or opposed in any way, and this belief often has egregious effects. A particularly appalling case of this so-called “right not to be offended” on college campuses occurred in 2008 at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis where a student was found guilty of “racial harassment” by the Affirmative Action Office simply for publicly reading a book entitled Notre Dame vs. The Klan. Even though the content of the book did not in any way favor the Ku Klux Klan, the picture of a KKK rally on the cover was offensive enough to the student’s peers to warrant the student being held fully responsible by the university.  In this way, the college campus has turned into a “safe space” where leftist students can expect to be infantilized and non-conforming students can expect to be censored and punished for even the most innocent of actions such as reading a book. This type of “education”, if one can rightfully call it that, can only produce coddled, overly sensitive pseudo-adults who are in no way ready to face any of the harsh realities of the real world after their four years of indoctrination are up.

 

Students are often censored or punished if their ideas do not match up perfectly with those of the left

 

All of this is the result of the domination of radical leftist doctrine in academia. Students have been indoctrinated into the leftist idea of inherent, oppressive social forces in society which are in no way tangible, but must be fought through any means necessary. They are taught that some of their peers, because of their skin color or economic status, are members of groups which only seek to subjugate and deny the rights of others. Understanding this, it is easy to comprehend why the status of university campuses is so dire and why reprehensible acts by liberals take place so often. It is much easier to condone hatred, vitriol and violence towards your peers when you are constantly told that their mere existence personally contributes to the abuse, systemic oppression, and death of entire groups of people. The radical ideas taught by much of the faculty on campuses have perverted the academic experience so that intellectual inquiry and progress are no longer the goals of many classes, but rather the goal is to make certain students feel undeservingly empowered and others feel ashamed for who they are. Classrooms are now considered by many to be “safe spaces” where liberal ideas are to be insulated from any outside criticism and leftist students need not feel any pressure to substantiate their beliefs. Identity on liberal campuses has become a demented game of “who is more oppressed”, sometimes known by the term “Oppression Olympics.” It has become a constant race of gaining the moral high ground and pulling rank on one’s peers based on immutable identities. College is now is a place where some students’ feelings matter more than the right of other students not to be physically harmed. It is a place where having the “wrong” ideas can get you in the worst kinds of trouble. It is a place divided into categories of  so-called systemic “victims” and “oppressors” where, incongruously enough, the “victims” have all the power.