Conservatives sour on colleges, understandably

Despite decades of talk radio hosts complaining about pointy-headed liberal academics, Republicans in 2010 were still pretty fond of higher education. Fifty-eight percent of them said that colleges had a positive effect on the country, a number that ticked along in roughly that range through 2014, then, whoa. It started to go off the cliff, hitting a mere 36 percent in Pew’s most recent poll.

Philip Bump of The Washington Post blames this on the focus “by conservative media on tensions at universities.”

“Conservative media,” he adds, “focused its attention on the idea of ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses, places where students would be sheltered from controversial or upsetting information or viewpoints. This idea quickly spread into a broader critique of left-wing culture, but anecdotal examples from individual universities, such as objections to scheduled speakers and warnings in classrooms, became a focal point.”

It’s the sort of theory that may sound plausible on first read, except — see the first sentence of this column.

Conservatives have been complaining about liberals in academia for a very long time — just about as long, in fact, as academia has been trending liberal. William F. Buckley rose to fame, and midwifed the modern conservative movement, after writing God and Man at Yale, which complained that elite educational institutions were excessively secular, collectivist and disposed toward government intervention in the economy. It was first published in 1951.

Since then, there have been plenty of mediagenic episodes for conservatives to get outraged over. If you’ve forgotten, Google “Ward Churchill” or “Sandra Fluke,” to name just two of the many, many students and professors whose sagas represent the lefty excesses of academia.

Yet Republicans apparently kept right on loving their colleges until 2015. After all, many Republicans can thank college for getting them a good job. A team to root for on frosty autumn days. Some lovely, hazy memories of beer-pong tournaments. Heck, maybe they even learned something.

So why, just in the past couple of years, would conservatives turn against colleges with a vengeance?

What’s changed, I submit, is that colleges have readily supplied conservatives with images of an institution that is not merely left-leaning, but actively hostile to conservatives, as conservative speech on campus has increasingly been threatened. It started with students pressing for speakers to be disinvited from graduation speeches — sometimes liberals, but often conservatives. Then angry minorities were allowed to shut down conservative speeches with increasingly raucous protests that eventually turned to violence. And when violence occurred, schools seemed noticeably uninterested in identifying or punishing the perpretrators.

Indeed, schools’ responses to leftist riots have been to make it maximally inconvenient for conservatives to speak (or be heard), to deliver a slap on the wrist against violent protests and to allow students to corner, bully and imprecate upon professors.

Academia is a left-wing institution, and I suspect that when the people in charge of it look at left-wing protesters, they see basically good-hearted kids who are overexuberant in their pursuit of the common good. And who wants to wreck the lives of a nice kid who made a bad mistake out of the best possible motives?

Whatever the reason, the picture that emerges is of an academia where orderly conservatives are unwelcome, but disorderly — even violent — leftists are tolerated. No wonder conservatives’ opinion of academia is falling.

Compare the welcome that the socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders received at fundamentalist Liberty University to the chaos when right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at Berkeley. If Sanders had gotten the Milo treatment, liberals might start to question whether academia is an unalloyed good. Conservatives have seen one disturbing incident after another in a short period of time. Whose fault is that? Not conservative media. Blame the rioters and the universities that allow them — and the smartphones that have made it easy to capture the misbehavior in vivid, viral videos.

Schools are going to have to adjust to the new realities of our panopticon world just as police departments have. They cannot defend the principle of free speech while winking at violations, because those violations are apt to become national events. When violent students try to shut down discourse, a quiet slap on the wrist is no longer an option.

If universities brand themselves as explicitly left-wing institutions that make no effort to be fair to conservative views, if they allow left-wing groups to appoint themselves as the thought police of what is theoretically a shared space, then they will open up gaping holes in their budgets and their enrollments, and the left’s fiefdom will fall to the enemy. It would behoove them to seek a binding peace now — one that offers both sides some living room. That could reverse the tanking public support for universities.