A Resurgence of Intolerance

Storm trooper tactics by bands of college students making ideological demands across the country, and immediate preemptive surrender by college administrators — such as at the University of Missouri recently — bring back memories of the 1960s, for those of us old enough to remember what it was like being there, and seeing first-hand how painful events unfolded.

At Harvard, back in 1969, students seized control of the administration building and began releasing to the media information from confidential personnel files of professors. But, when university president Nathan Pusey called in the police to evict the students, the faculty turned against him, and he resigned.

At least equally disgraceful things happened at Cornell, at Columbia, and on other campuses across the country. But there was one major university that stood up to the campus storm troopers — the University of Chicago.

Too often these are campuses with virtually no diversity of viewpoints, despite however much they may be obsessed with demographic diversity.

It is not hard to tell which campuses are strongholds of ideological intolerance, where individual students dare not express an opinion different from the opinion of their professors or different from the opinions of student activists. There are sources of information about such places, systematically collected and evaluated.

One outstanding source of such information is a college guide which rates colleges and universities on their ideological intolerance, giving a red light rating to institutions where such abuses are rampant, a green light where there is freedom of speech and a yellow light for places in between.

That college guide is “Choosing the Right College,” which is by far the best of the college guides for other reasons as well. It gave the University of Missouri a red light rating, and spelled out its problems, two years before Mizzou made headlines this year as a symbol of academic cowardice and moral bankruptcy.

The University of Chicago gets a green light rating as a place where both conservative and liberal students are allowed free rein. Some engineering schools like M.I.T. get green light ratings because their students are too engrossed in their studies to have much time for politics, though Georgia Tech gets a red light rating.

Other red light ratings go to Duke, Vassar, Vanderbilt, Rutgers, Wesleyan and many others. More important, the reasons are spelled out. There is also another source of information and ratings of colleges and universities on their degree of freedom of speech. This is a watchdog organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

If parents and donors start checking out intolerant colleges and universities before deciding where to send their money, the caving in to indoctrinating professors and storm trooper students will no longer be the path of least resistance for academic administrators.

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