Academic centrists, conservatives, libertarians and purists — yours truly among them — screaming from the rooftops for years about the political bias among university professors is not news. On the other hand, that a growing movement of moderate-to-conservative students are fed up with such bias and are now naming names, this qualifies as news.
To the utter disenchantment of many colleagues of mine who otherwise respect what they perceive as my intellect, this is what they might refer to as the fog that surrounds me. Since I was a freshman in college, I have despised the overwhelmingly leftist — I won't dignify it by calling it liberal — bias among a majority of professors.
Pick a school, any school outside the realm of religion. Take an Ivy League school, a Big 12 school, and SEC school, a Pac 10 school, a tiny liberal arts enclave somewhere in Ohio: you will find, on average, a minimum of 80 percent of its faculty identifying itself as politically liberal — more often than not, 90 to 95 percent — to put it nicely.
That our nation is more or less split between somewhat conservative, moderate and somewhat liberal should clue you in to why this is a problem.
If you're a junior, you have no doubt by now encountered at least one professor who has used the bully pulpit that is a lectern and orgasmically proclaimed a divine hatred of (pick one or more) our President, the American Way, Capitalism, Israel; referred to America and/or its institutions as the greater terrorist threat, or in general has taken a basic 2000-level course — if you're lucky — and turned it into a macabre baptism-by-fire ritual of leftist indoctrination.
Throughout my college and graduate years — not all at OSU — I can immediately think of five such professors, name the course they taught and the gibberish they espoused. I cannot think of one conservative professor who did the same, though I may very well not have noticed.
From these professors, I learned one very dear lesson: don't try to argue with a jerk who has access to your grade point. Since I never was a grade hound, I didn't follow my own advice and have an undergrad GPA about a half-point lower than it could have been.
So, with all that invective, does my perfect campus consist of a bunch of right-wingers preaching from the varied libertine bibles? No, not really.
The greatest professor I ever had is a proud, outstanding liberal. She taught me more about the given subject and my own potential than I could have ever dreamed. She not only encouraged me then, she still encourages me to this day, nine years later. It is people like said professor that dissuade me from writing off anyone describing themselves as liberal point-blank.
Yet for every professor like this, and for every professor who is conservative, there are so many more who can't stand those like me because they see us and ours as little Nazis hell-bent on world domination or, as is more likely the case, little fools who've danced through lives of privilege blind to the pain of the world existing outside our own myopic fantasies.
Happily, this is changing. To wit, there is The Academic Bill of Rights as brought about by Students for Academic Freedom — see www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
Still in its infancy, there are now 105 college clubs pushing to get the bill pushed through varied student governments. Regardless of what its uninformed critics say, it's not a quota system — its founders, most notably David Horowitz, have repeatedly insisted that it is actually against quotas and, moreover, so are they — read it.
There is www.campuswatch.org, an organization that is beginning to bring to light student organizations, professors and programs that are sowing very dangerous seeds, the fruits of which are a nasty trend of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist agenda — for the unaware, this means Jew-hatred.
Closer to home, there is the group Young Conservatives of Texas — now with chapters in 10 Texas schools, www.yct.org — those alleged jackboot bastards who are flushing out professors using their positions of intellectual power as campgrounds for antiquated leftist ideals while refusing to present both sides of issues not so simply defined as right or left.
Needless to say, the left is outraged. How dare students organize against what they see as unfairness, all while questioning the master's use of the political whip. They throw around "McCarthyism" and "blacklist" with masochistic glee, secretly hoping they'll be made to suffer for the greater good of their bankrupt ideas.
They shout of their freedom of speech while incapable of recognizing their students' right to a balanced presentation of a given subject. Thankfully, some are finally being held accountable.