Academia's Campuses: Blue or Red

This Sunday, thousands of parents will be dragging their teenagers to the National College Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to check out the exhibits of more than 300 schools.Those exhibits will provide the students with information about the courses and degree programs offered and other pertinent data about the institutions. What probably will not be listed in the college brochures and packages is whether the education institution swings left or right.

The New YorkTimes reported last December that a survey of 1,000 academics found Democrats outnumbering Republicans seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, that proportion was nine to one.That imbalance in political identity has led some conservatives to consider legislating some form of equilibrium in faculty hires. That is nonsense, because this situation has been around for years, and with a little common sense, parents should be able to clue their children in on the facts of life in academia.

After 12 years of parochial-school training, I had no trouble recognizing that my professor of political science at Hunter College was a Marxist, or what we affectionately labeled in the 1960s “a commie pinko.”What I didn’t understand in my na�Ee youth was that this intellectual elitist would not take kindly to a student questioning his denigration of our capitalist society.

I had always been encouraged by the nuns at Cathedral High School to speak my mind and to query the obscure. We were taught that curiosity, while it may have killed the cat, in the classroom was a sign of a vibrant intellect. But that was private school, and I learned too late to shut my mouth, and at Hunter I scraped through with a D in political science.

That man’s abuse of academic authority has, of course, continued, as evidenced by the experiences of my daughters at public and private colleges. One daughter is taking extra courses at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York, and another just completed her sophomore year at St. John’s University.

Admittedly, last year was a politically charged year and the 2004 presidential election weighed heavily on the minds of most Americans. Still, that was no excuse for the bizarre behavior of one teacher at CSI, who was supposed to be teaching Core 100 U.S. History but instead spent most of the class time peddling the New York Times.

“This is the only paper I want you to read,” she told the class.

She assigned homework based on articles in that paper, rather than the textbook that my daughter paid $80 for and never used. The teacher also made no pretense of concealing her choice for president and routinely criticized the Bush administration. When President Bush was re-elected, she came to class dressed in black and announced that she was in mourning. The professor then looked at my daughter and told her she must be gloating at the result. My daughter had never challenged the teacher during class, so it was only through her written assignments that the teacher gleaned her conservative bent. Fortunately, my daughter wasn’t influenced by this militant professor, but she was concerned about the na�Eet�Eof the recent high school graduates who soaked up the liberal humbug the teacher spouted.

By contrast, my youngest daughter never knew how any of her St. John’s professors stood politically, because they were more interested in teaching the assigned courses than promoting any agenda.

St. John’s University will be one of the 300 schools at the College Fair, along with many smaller institutions that should be considered as an alternative to the more illustrious Ivy League liberal icons.

One college that will not be represented is the King’s College, a beleaguered institution of higher learning in the Empire State Building. It is a small evangelical school that is the subject of a hostile campaign by a member of the Board of Regents, John Brademas, the former Democratic congressman and president of New York University. For some strange reason, Mr. Brademas is conducting a crusade against the King’s College. In spite of its rigorous curriculum, excellent record, and stellar faculty, he has succeeded in delaying full accreditation of the college by raising bogus objections and casting spurious allegations about its legitimacy. Maybe he doesn’t care for the King’s College mission statement, found on its Web site, www.tkc.com:

“Our vision is to graduate students who will go on to positions of leadership in the key institutions of society: government, law, business, education, media, the arts, and the church.”

Church? Wow. A college located in the center of the bluest city,but without liberal mind-control. What a concept!