Video: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Article: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Article: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Entry: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Video: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

For decades, administrators and professors – especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities – have waged a campaign to regulate speech. Their contrived transgressions and expedients – trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, free-speech zones, bias response teams, and more – exposed higher education to public ridicule.

The conspicuous targets at colleges and universities impelled reformers to defend on campus the right to express, and to hear expressed, dissenting opinions.

While free speech on campus deteriorated, administrators and professors – especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities – built, or did little to protest the building of, intellectual monocultures. In classrooms and student cafeterias as much as in departmental meetings and faculty lounges, progressive opinions operated as orthodoxy while conservative opinions – when someone had the bad taste to bring them up – elicited discomfort, disapproval, or denunciation. Consumed with diversity of skin color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender, colleges and universities created student bodies and faculties deficient in diversity of views and ideas, forms of diversity that are essential to liberal education.

The paucity of conservative voices on campus has been less visible than have been colleges’ and universities’ offenses against free speech. While aggressively regulating thought and discussion, colleges and universities quietly and behind the scenes exploited bureaucratic mechanisms and acted on unspoken but widely shared prejudices – in admitting students and in hiring, retaining, and promoting faculty – to exclude conservatives and perpetuate campus orthodoxy. Consequently, it has taken reformers longer to recognize the urgency of ensuring that American colleges and universities also provide a home to students who espouse conservative views and professors who can present conservative opinions and teach vital subjects such as military and religious history, in which conservatives disproportionately specialize.

Free speech and intellectual diversity promote toleration and civility and equip students to think creatively and independently. Restoring them will contribute to the repair of liberal education. But liberal education is about substance as well as about forms.

It is not any old course of study that cultivates free and democratic citizens. Yet our nation’s most selective colleges and universities have largely abandoned core curricula. And they have discarded the idea that higher education in America should be grounded in the exploration of the basic ideas, key institutions, and major events that define America and which distinguish the........

© RealClearPolitics