https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/war-over-campus-politics-matters/What happens in the academy rarely stays there.
Universities have become key battlegrounds in the American culture wars. Conservatives rail against “leftist monoculture” in academia, liberals decry the conservative “obsession” with college campuses, and the air is quickly filled with the heat of mutual recriminations.
Amid the crossfire, some liberal commentators have offered moderate and well-reasoned interpretations of academia’s troubles. They point out that although university faculties do lean overwhelmingly to the left, it’s quite rare for students to be “successfully” indoctrinated by their progressive professors. Others note that there already exists a certain degree of viewpoint diversity in some areas of academia, given the prevalence of right-leaning professors in, for example, economics and law departments. There’s some truth to such arguments, though I would maintain that many college environments are indeed stifling intellectual freedom. (A personal example: When I wrote an essay for my college paper defending the Western literary canon, I was promptly accused in print of having been “indoctrinated by white supremacy.” Needless to say, nobody enjoys being accused of such things.)
But another common view among many liberals holds that even if academia has an ideological-homogeneity problem, it is artificially amplified by the right-wing media’s addiction to covering the excesses of leftist university culture. Sure, this argument goes, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and hysterical breakdowns over Halloween costumes can be annoying, but they do not merit the relentless stream of conservative op-eds, Fox News segments, and right-wing-news stories condemning “liberal snowflakes” and “radical professors.” The social-justice mobs might be scary, but their influence is confined to a tiny sector of society: universities, and elite universities at that.