Vindicated

Though it's been almost a year since it happened, I still think back on a conversation about "liberal education" that I had with the Fund for American Studies organizers over lunch in the cafeteria that gave rise to "freedom fries." They were justifying the crazily ideological curriculum of the program's courses as being a way to counterbalance bias in university classrooms everywhere else. At the time, I didn't know what to say beyond my feeling that professors at UCSB were liberal, but still gave the other side, while we didn't even know another side existed at CATO or in our rented classroom at Georgetown. In fact, charges of bias and principles of academic freedom were so on my professor's minds when I returned to SB that they almost gave preference to students with conservative viewpoints because they were running scared from the David Horowitzes of the right.

It's frustrating to hear even left-leaning students accept this notion of liberal bias in all of academia. But it's always good to see concrete evidence to the contrary:

The campus Left, which is still organized for the most part by students and community activists, increasingly finds itself facing off against seasoned conservative strategists. And while progressive student groups are mostly self-funded, by the mid-1990s roughly $20 million dollars were being pumped into the campus Right annually, according to People for the American Way.

That money and expertise are directed at four distinct goals: training conservative campus activists; supporting right-wing student publications; indoctrinating the next generation of culture warriors; and demonstrating the liberal academic "bias" that justifies many conservatives' reflexive anti-intellectualism.

Their argument is false, but they've got a forumlaic, well-funded strategy--and that's why they can round up kids and perpetuate such lies.