These days, there's nothing surprising about the liberal bias on college campuses. But it is surprising when a liberal admits it. In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof stunned plenty of his colleagues by outing academia for the proving ground of progressive bias. His column, "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance," was a candid look at the lack of intellectual diversity in education today, and how -- in censoring or marginalizing the conservative views -- the Left was shunning the diversity it supposedly champions. "We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays, and Muslims at the table -- so long as they aren't conservatives."
To support his theory, he highlights a handful of surveys of university campuses that show it's easier to find a Marxist professor of the social sciences than a Republican professor of the humanities. In the English Department alone, only two percent of faculty identity as conservative. That doesn't come as a surprise to Dr. Carol Swain, who joined me yesterday on "Washington Watch" to talk about her personal run-in with the progressive mafia. As an African-American woman, she was threatened, protested, and verbally abused for exposing students to other views in one of academia's elite laboratories of radicalism. And what are these offensive views? That radical Islam -- the same extremism that toppled the World Trade Centers -- is a grave threat to the American way of life.
Apparently, this offended students' delicate sensibilities and resulted in a campus-wide firestorm. Among other things, students accuse Carol of expressing hatred toward minorities -- which is ridiculous because she is a minority! On the show, she said she understood why someone like sociologist George Yancey would say that he faced more problems as a Christian inside academia than he did as a black man outside it. Thankfully, the petition to fire Dr. Swain from her position at Vanderbilt failed, and she's back at work encouraging intellectual diversity on campus -- and in her new book, Who's Stealing Our Kids?
