Hey, teacher — leave those kids alone

Steven Roy Goodman is an educational consultant who advises college-bound students and their families. In today’s Washington Post, he urges college professors to “come back to earth.” Goodman writes:

Colleges have long been hotbeds of political agitation, of course. But where it was once students who did the acting out, as they spread their intellectual and philosophical wings, now the professors and administrators are more likely to be playing politics — and more and more Americans with college-age kids are getting fed up with it. In 18 years of in-the-trenches experience counseling kids on their college choices, I’ve never seen the unhappiness as widespread as it is today. If colleges don’t tone down the politics, and figure out how to control ballooning costs, they run the risk of turning off enough American consumers that many campuses could marginalize themselves right out of existence.

The professors, of course, have no intention of coming back to earth, and their friends and former colleagues, the administators, have no intention of trying to bring them back. Thus, parents can look forward to paying more than $40,000 per year so their children can take courses like “Pornography and Evoluion,” or (if the children are sensible) try to dodge the nutty leftist professor who teach such nonsense and attempt to enforce the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy.
My Weekly Standard column, which will appear tomorrow, deals with
events at Columbia University. It explains how a recently-released report whitewashes faculty intimidation of students by pro-Palestinian faculty members, while discouraging students from expressing dissent and seeking out alternative voices. Columbia doesn’t want its professors to come back to earth; it wants its students to join them in their flight of anti-western fancy, or at least to keep quiet during the ride.