Academic Censorship

It's not news to anyone who has been paying attention, but John Leo does an excellent job of describing one of the most important problems afflicting America's intellectual institutions; censorship of free thought and expression.

[T]he champions of censorship are mostly on the left. And they are thickest on the ground in our colleges and universities. Since the late 1980s, what should be the most open, debate-driven, and tolerant sector of society has been in thrall to the diversity and political correctness that now form the aggressive secular religion of America’s elites.

The censors have only grown in power, elevating antidiscrimination rules above “absolutist” free-speech principles, silencing dissent with antiharassment policies, and looking away when students bar or disrupt conservative speakers or steal conservative newspapers. Operating under the tacit principle that “error has no rights,” an ancient Catholic theological rule, the new censors aren’t interested in debates or open forums. They want to shut up dissenters.

Read it here.

The problem is serious and is rapidly growing and is something that should concern everyone, students, parents, and the general public. As leftist indoctrination more and more replaces education on American campuses the quality of our national intellectual culture declines rapidly. And, since academic institutions demonstrably are unable resist the Left's attempt to achieve intellectual hegemony, pressure for reform must come from outside academia. The insidious squelching of free thought, described by Leo, is real, it is pervasive, and it invites outside interference in the sacred groves of academe.

A hard rain's a'gonna fall -- and academic radicals have only themselves to blame.