Campuses Incubator For Intolerance
How surprised were you to learn that the Unabomber suspect came out of Berkeley in the 1960s?
Unfortunately, many of our elite institutions are hotbeds for producing people who think that they are little tin gods whose role is to pass judgment on other people’s ways of life - and to act on this self-flattering vision of the world. Not all have the technical knowledge or the cold-bloodedness to go around blowing up people with different views from theirs. But they do a lot of damage in other ways.
If bigotry means denying others the rights that you claim for yourself, then places like Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford and Duke produce more than their share of self-righteous bigotry. Common decency means nothing to those who take upon themselves the role of prescribing how other people should live or even think.
It is no longer news when conservative speakers are shouted down or even assaulted on college campuses. Far more damaging to a marketplace of ideas is the practice of using ideological litmus tests when deciding which professors to hire.
Ideological intolerance is not confined to academic campuses, though that is where it flourishes most vehemently. But do not expect to see a public presentation of both sides of issues involving homosexuality or AIDS in San Francisco. Nor should you expect to see very many rational discussions of affirmative action anywhere. In both cases, people who disagree with the prevailing dogmas on these subjects are to be shouted down, demonized, harassed, or even physically attacked.
While it has long been the case that the intelligentsia is much farther to the left than the average citizen or voter, what is not so widely known is that this leftward bias is strongest at the most prestigious colleges and universities. Why should this be so?
Leftists will of course say that this just shows that all the smartest people know that left is the way to go. There is another explanation, however. Those at the elite institutions have been told, by word and deed, that they are something special - the “cream of the crop” as the title of a recent book by a Stanford professor describes Stanford students.
In addition to being taught how wonderful they are, students at elite institutions are taught over and over how unworthy is the world of lesser beings in the crass society around them, how much in need of the superior wisdom and virtue of the brightest and the best. This sophomoric vision runs all through the Unabomber’s manifesto that was published last year, as it does through much that comes out of elite academia across the country.
Add to this the general “self-esteem” cult that increasingly dominates our educational institutions, from the public schools to the colleges and universities. The theory is that higher self-esteem will lead to higher educational achievements and a happier and less troublesome generation. However, to the true believers, this is not just a theory. It is a fact - not because there is any evidence for it, but because all the other self-congratulatory anointed agree.
Apparently the very idea of testing the self-esteem theory against evidence has seldom, if ever, occurred to those who promote it. Recently, however, an article in the “Psychological Review” presented evidence that violence does not come from low self-esteem but from high self-esteem that others do not agree with.
People like Lee Harvey Oswald have had absolutely grandiose visions of themselves - visions repeatedly contradicted by the reality of their lives and the disdain of those they encountered. Anyone who reads the Unabomber’s manifesto will see the same inflated ego at work.
Many of the people who go to our elite colleges and universities are in fact remarkable, though in a narrow range of endeavors out of the vast spectrum of human activities. But so are trapeze artists or chess champions - and nobody thinks that they are entitled to tell everybody else how to live, much less decide who should die for disagreeing.
The notion that violence is justified when the anointed don’t get their way has been an undercurrent on the left for at least the past 30 years. Mob rule by the left is not merely tolerated but praised on elite college campuses - and not just because of leniency in general, for conservative students who merely say something politically incorrect can find themselves suspended or expelled in a heartbeat.
Not only on campus, but in society at large, riots in favor of liberal-left causes are christened “demonstrations.” Judges often give such rioters wrist-slap punishments, if they are punished at all.
The Unabomber may have acted alone, but he had lots of accomplices anyway.
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