Random academia thought

Irony, thy name is academia.  Today’s academia revels in its rabble rousing past, particularly its dissent during the Vietnam War.  It also romanticizes the free exchange of ideas.  But in today’s universities, speech codes are common, ideas are only welcome if they fit into a liberal orthodoxy, and dissent is most unwelcome.  Do the professors of today not understand that they have turned higher learning into a liberal version of the academic structure they so rebelled against thirty to forty years ago? 

 

I consider myself fortunate.  I thought I was a liberal for most of my college years.  I espoused some views that, in hindsight, were quite conservative though.  I by and large avoided trouble by quickly learning how far I could and could not push individual professors (I still earned myself a little trouble).  Only God knows how much trouble I’d have gotten myself into during my college years if it weren’t for my naïveté and a little common sense.