Radicals In Quarantine

Occasionally I run across articles denouncing the ideological excesses of today's colleges and universities. I completely support ridiculing the multiculturalist inanities that make it to press. However, when I read pieces calling for the protection of "our naive children from these latter-day Chamberlains" I feel I must interject with a note of realism. The logic of the campus crusaders seems to be that we must drive the Marxists from the ivory tower because they are doing damage to society. I would argue rather, that Marxists were driven to the ivory tower so they couldn't do damage to society. Having a coterie of tamed radicals isolated from the real world (and academia is grossly isolated from the real world) while thinking they are making a difference is a brilliant coup for the status-quo.

But what about the children!? the crusaders cry. I have years of university experience under my belt, and I can say with some authority that students are far too apathetic for professors with a political agenda to have any influence. A loud minority makes the situation seem otherwise, but that is because the silent majority simply doesn't give a shit enough to refute them. Most people want to get their degree, get drunk and get out of there. If they're in certain Arts programs, they know to stick to the party line about feminism and the oppressed in the classroom, and completely refute it in their actions outside. Talking to a couple of (female, naturally) Women's Studies students once, I was surprised at how jaundiced they were about what they were taught. They knew the idea that men are responsible for all the world's ills wouldn't help them with their actual problems, but they also knew pretending was an easy way to get marks.

Some students are naive dupes, no doubt about it. But more often than not it is the radical professors being told what they want to hear who are the naive dupes. Further, such radical professors, at least in my schooling experience, are still in the minority and are easy to avoid if you know what to look for in class descriptions (words like "problematizing"). Generally they are relegated to English and things that end in Studies that are as good as quarantined by those students seeking a traditional liberal arts education. Where would status-quo boosters rather have the tenured rebels and aging hippies who populate "Peace Studies": in the halls of government, or in the halls of the Robert C. Miller Arts Building across from the student center teaching Postcolonial Conflict Resolution in West Indies Literature?