If you're not a liberal when you're young, you've got no soul.
If you're not conservative when you're older, you've got no brains.
or "A conservative is a liberal who just got mugged."
Anyway, the gist of the man's argument is:
"Few conservative students ever become liberals during college, and vice versa. Higher education’s political influence may be less one of liberalization and more one of polarization, as centrist students gradually drift to one side of the spectrum or the other. Conservatives agitated over the idea of pervasive university radicalism are frothing at the mouth over nothing. Hard, statistical evidence pointing to a widespread “indoctrination” of college students into liberal thought simply does not exist.
What benign increase in the ranks of liberal students during college that does occur—roughly 4 percent—is not due to “indoctrination” at the hands of tenured socialists and radicals. It is, rather, a result of intellectual maturation combined with a stimulating collegiate social life that shapes and strengthens the values of equality and acceptance. If the lecture halls of America’s universities are “one-party classrooms,” as Horowitz says, maybe it’s because conservatism has forgotten that school is in session.
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In another context, that last paragraph would be called "blaming the victim".
ReplyDeleteHe calls it "maturation"; others call it "rot". It's a question of degree of exposure, really.
ReplyDeleteAfter four years or so steeped in predominantly the "left" side's ideas with little respectful exposure to the right's ideas, I think college students, as a group, are subject to a bit of brain rot. Expecting students to come to their own well-reasoned conclusions in most college environments is like expecting a judge to find for defendants sometimes when the public defenders are missing en masse. Students need both sides of the story, presented by people on both sides.