By FAIRFIELD PINPOINT

2007-07-19

It is no
secret that higher education is dominated by left-leaning professors and
administrators. The evidence is
overwhelming both anecdotally and empirically. Readers may remember that Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers had the audacity to
suggest that personal choices and natural inclinations resulted in demographic
imbalances in certain fields. While
discussing “women’s representation in tenured positions in science and
engineering,” Summers also said:

To take a set of diverse examples,
the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially
underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying
profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented
in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially
underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in
which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it’s important to try to
think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation.

While this
would have been enough to condemn him in the court of his colleagues’ opinions,
he continued:

It does appear that on many, many
different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall
IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence
that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a
difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female
population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not
plausibly, culturally determined.

Summers
reached out his hand and touched one of the many third rails of
liberalism. To American Leftists, there
are no differences between men and women aside from the occasional body part. The now-former President was tarred and
feathered verbally and subsequently fired.
So much for intellectual freedom.

By an
astounding margin, college professors proudly call themselves liberals. According to a 2005 study, 72% proclaim their
allegiance to liberalism while only 15% call themselves conservatives. And they are even more liberal than the
average Democrat. 84% support abortion,
and 88% favor protecting the environment at the expense of jobs and the
economy. 65% want the government to
guarantee full employment.

Why is
this the case? Tenure may hold one of
the keys to unlocking this great mystery.
If a person can never be fired, then that person can more easily support
saving trees at the expense of the economy while at the same time taking up for
the out-of-work lumberjacks and supporting a governmental obligation to provide
work.

Professors
also see themselves as visionaries out to solve the inequities of the
world. Hardcore feminist theory dictates
that childbirth is a tool of male oppression.
Obviously, under those circumstances, abortion levels the playing field. The elimination of poverty would be a major
quest for such visionaries as well.
Social equality at all costs is the order of the day in both the
classroom and at the administrative level, evidenced by varying admissions
standards for disparate groups.

Most of
all, however, the root could simply be traced to the type of work in which
professors are engaged. They trade in
theory. Psychology professors think they
can solve the riddles of the human mind based on theories from Freud’s to the
present. Archeology professors suppose
they can write volumes about long gone societies based simply on a few bones
and artifacts. Historians can place
value judgments on anything in the American past while embracing most any
action from foreign cultures (e.g. Waiting until 1920 for women’s suffrage was
an abomination while hijabs and burkas are a rich cultural expression worthy of
the deepest respect). In theory it can
all make sense.

From
there, it is not long before Marxism, the greatest theory of the nineteenth
century becomes appealing. The theory
can be divorced from its application, which proved disastrous in the twentieth
century, in hypothetical situations.
Each component can be examined based on individual merits without the
least concern over the practical implications.
The Soviet communists thought so much of full employment that they wrote
it into their constitution. Marxism’s
claim to protect the economic rights of the individual seems only fair. On the surface, who wouldn’t want a lifetime
of economic security with constitutional guarantees of housing, health care,
and employment?

At
institutions of higher learning anything reflecting traditional values is passé
if not taboo. Christianity is a
dangerous subject. Anything reflecting a
disdain for foreign cultures is xenophobia and narrow-mindedness. Right is wrong, and wrong is right. Cultures are relative, and morality is
relative (except for what passes for left-leaning morality, of course).

Since more
and more people are attending college, why then is the entire country not
becoming overwhelmingly liberal? Fortunately for the sake of the nation, most
students spend more time text messaging in class than reading textbooks.