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Contemporary liberalism as iterated in tertiary academia is a remnant of the memory of radical Marxism, which inspired the intellectual elite with idealism and hope in the early part of the twentieth century. In the wake of the abuses of capitalism of the Golden Age, and the callous waste of young lives in World War I perpetrated by the leadership of the conservative Western democracies to serve the interests of colonialism and imperialism, such a reaction among the intellectual classes was understandable. Early proponents of egalitarian left-wing views sought to address the abuses of a system which had become closed to alternative views and voices, and authoritarian in its willingness to silence dissent.
The current senior faculty members of most universities in the United States were the radical students of the 1960s, whose mentors harbored that flame of flirtation with the Marxist orientation left over from the 1920s and 1930s, and encouraged their younger counterparts to rebel. The current younger faculty cohort is largely composed of their former students. Thus are academic attitudes preserved and passed down through generations of educators. That these attitudes are nearly unanimously leftist stems from the orientation of each succeeding wave of tenured faculty, who, following the example of their mentors since to do otherwise would risk their own survival at the institution, eschew any deviation from the received orthodoxy and who effectively blackball and deny tenure to potential colleagues whose views do not reflect their own.
The irony of this, of course, is that the training and inculcation of each generation's students with the ideas and attitude of its predecessors has resulted in American college and university faculties becoming increasingly hidebound and closed to diverse opinions, views, and thoughts. University faculties, in this way, are among the most conservative of American institutions, in the sense of being resistant to change and unwilling to entertain structural or ideological diversity.
Other than in the professional schools and some postgraduate departments, many of our institutions of higher learning, which are meant to be dynamic centers for academic debate and open discussion, have mutated into indoctrination camps for leftist ideology engaged in the active recruitment of new cadres of activists whose goal is to further entrench and enhance the power of the status quo -- thus typifying the very abuses of monolithic, authoritarian power structures which the early Marxists felt compelled to address, and which formed the basis for the reaction of the leftist youth movements of the 20s, 30s, and 60s.
When I saw the question being asked in this thread, my first reaction was to wonder why academia isn't conservative or at least more conservative as it appears to be.
I don't think that it's a matter of liberals not liking to work for a living. That's way too simplistic. Teaching at any level is hard work. But perhaps conservatives shun careers in academia in favor of higher-paying positions in the private sector.
I don't think that it's a matter of liberals not liking to work for a living. That's way too simplistic. Teaching at any level is hard work. But perhaps conservatives shun careers in academia in favor of higher-paying positions in the private sector.
I think they're actually finding that most aren't that liberal. I have only had one particularly left-leaning professor so far, and she was a public health teacher.
I'm guessing the whole "academia = liberal" thing goes to the days when it was mainly the well-to-do who could afford studying the liberal arts instead of going straight to work.
Either way, a well-educated populace is something we ought to strive for regardless of political leanings. Imagine where we'd be without thinkers!
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