Commentary: Progressive academics are to blame for America’s current crisis

This is where a part of my concern lies: in the hateful and closed-minded attitudes some professors pass on to their students.

Unsplash stock photo

It’s no secret that many American universities are dominated by leftist ideology. As a politically-minded student, I was already aware of this before attending the college of my choice. I expected to see some bias in the classroom, but what I experienced went above and beyond that expectation.

What I observed in college classrooms was the transmission of dangerous attitudes and parasitic ideas from leading professors. The ideological warfare I witnessed was not merely one between “left” and “right” leaning political beliefs. Radical American academia wages a war on traditional liberalism, freedom of speech, and other pillars of our society. With the aids of postmodernism, social-constructivism, and “woke-ness,” they undermine the tenets which made America great.

After spending four years in college, I ought to be near comfortably numb hearing the damnation of white men, capitalism, and religion. My professors would write these off like a checklist early on in the semester so everyone knew where they stood. Whether I was trying to learn about international politics or art history, I’d hear the same condemning narrative on these subjects.

This is where a part of my concern lies: in the hateful and closed-minded attitudes some professors pass on to their students. In a field like the liberal arts, a professor ought to be able to present competing ideas fairly, engage the class in productive discussion, and evoke curiosity in dissenting opinions. By sterilizing freedom of speech, professors pass on their cognitive distortion of black and white thinking to students.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.” This generation of academics is not just being taught to criticize their society — but to disavow many of its defining principles entirely.  We can already see how postmodern ideas and the death of liberalism has taken root in our government and culture at large.

Differentiating between male and female is not only useless, but offensive to some. Individuals are not made significant by their god-bestowed dignity, but by their racial identity. It’s no wonder that segregation has made its way back into our country. After countless men and women risked their lives to end segregation during the civil rights movement, it is beginning to make a comeback. Many universities today have created segregated spaces and routinely host segregated graduation ceremonies for students based on their sexual or racial identity.

What America faces is a crisis in culture being produced by progressive universities. The only way to escape its destructive nature is to end censorship on college campuses and empower students to question the radical narrative of professors.

 

Katie Larsen

Katie Larsen is a cartoonist and writer for Alpha News.