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Milton Friedman offered a plausible explanation: the Vietnam War and draft dodging for staying in school. Young men of a conservative bent went over there, 10,000 miles way, to fight and die in this war. Young lefties, instead, pursued graduate degrees in droves.

Local school board primary this week. Not excited.

By Walter Block

Lefty professors at American colleges and universities are shocked, (shocked!) to discover that under the new rules promulgated by the Trump administration they are obliged, for the first time in their careers, to watch their Ps and Qs or else face serious and negative consequences.

Academics from Florida are leading the parade with their complaints since it is Governor Ron DeSantis, the point man for President Trump in this educational counter-revolution, who first instituted reforms aligned with the new policy.

The bitter grievance of these campus whiners is that they are now being heavily penalized for using the wrong words. Their favorite courses are being canceled. Entire departments are being scrutinized to see if there is even a vestige of intellectual diversity, and when those looking fail to find any, there are consequences. They are under the gun.

This is nothing less than poetic justice. These professors are finding that they do not much like it now that the shoe is on the other foot. They do not have a smidgen of appreciation for the age-old rule that turnabout is fair play. Now that they are subjected to the same sort of stultifying oversight they have long imposed upon the rare conservative or libertarian professor allowed on campus, the outcry is deafening.

Professors like me have little sympathy. We have been subjected to sensitivity training—re-education camps, in effect—for supposedly misusing pronouns, and for using words like “Oriental,” “cotton,” “slavery,” and “freedom.” There was even a professor excoriated for correctly pronouncing a Chinese phrase in class that sounded like the N word (nèi ge, literally meaning “that one,” and used as a filler word like the English “uh” or “um.”). As for “niggardly,” let us not go there.

Nevertheless, I think that Trump, DeSantis, and many other Republican politicians, bless them, are barking up the wrong tree. Their hearts are indeed in the right place, the exact right place, but their policies leave something to be desired.

Why do I say this?

If every last black “studies” department, feminist “studies” department, queer “studies” department, every last one of them were canceled, the virus would still remain in the academic patient’s body. The tenured Marxist professors who taught them would merely move over to humanities and social science departments. The administrators who run these dens of iniquity would still be in charge of the campus zoo.

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