America's Colleges aren't Educating Their Students, They're Patronizing Them

“Too often, American college students face a one-question test, based not on facts, but on ideology. The test: ‘Are you a liberal, or conservative?'” Michael Munger, the former chairman of Duke’s political science department writes in the Washington Examiner. Guess which is the correct answer — it’s not much of a stretch:

“He who knows only his own side of the case,” Mill wrote, “knows little of that.…if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

Students who pass the one-question test find themselves in this position, and no one loves them enough to tell them. They respond to others’ ideas and arguments with anti-intellectual, argument-stopping cliches such as “micro-aggression” and “check your privilege.” They impugn the motives of their interlocutors (“you must be funded by the Koch brothers”) or even impugn entire disciplines (“economists don’t understand the real world”). This is turning academia into a toxic retention pond with a dangerous concentration of ignorance and ideological bigotry. And it is now gradually bleeding its way into mainstream culture.

This is not about liberalism – it is about education. Conservatives who don’t understand liberal arguments are just as brain dead as today’s most closed-minded liberal graduates. It’s just that most conservatives can’t make it through college without heavy exposure to opposing views.

Education requires collision with error. And many students of all ideological persuasions — but especially those on the Left — may finally begin seeing through a system would rather patronize than educate them.

Perhaps reducing the number of stories like this:

Progressives are so insecure. https://t.co/UyyJ6ILlhK

— jon gabriel (@exjon) April 11, 2015

Indeed they are; “At U of Michigan, a Muslim Student Unmasks the Hypocrite He Says Vandalized His Apartment: The perpetrator was a liberal activist and decorated campus Muslim leader who said American Sniper promoted violence.” As the InstaProfessor writes, “You know what promotes violence? Leftist social-justice-war ideology.”

Related: Of course, colleges aren’t the only institutes patronizing their customers and advancing the SJW-industrial complex; at Real Clear Politics, Cathy Young explores “The Media’s Believe-the-Survivor Syndrome.”