Much has been written about the intellectual and ideological monoculture of today's universities. Academia is eager to celebrate diversity in all things save political opinion. University faculties are overwhelmingly liberal and the professoriat sees it as their professional responsibility to do all they can to proselytize their students.
A recent article in The Economist has some interesting things to say about this state of affairs.
Tom Wolfe's new novel about a young student, I am Charlotte Simmons, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland - about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to "Animal House".
In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students "hook up" (i.e. sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap.
Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect (that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He fires off a few predictable arrows at "diversoids" - students who are chosen on the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of the diversity industry.
Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of "diversity officers". Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.
The likelihood of much changing in universities in the near future is slim. The Republican business elite doesn't give a fig about silly academic fads in the humanities so long as American universities remain on the cutting edge of science and technology. As for the university establishment, leftists are hardly likely to relinquish their grip on one of the few bits of America where they remain in the ascendant. And that is a tragedy not just for America's universities but also for liberal thought.
It's worth reading the entire piece.
