“The reality on most college and university campuses differs greatly from what outsiders think. Administrators and professors are open to diversity of race, sex, and sexual preference and pretty much to everyone under the sun except for straight white males. Intellectual diversity is to them like the cross to a vampire. It is evil, sexist, racist, ci-gendered, and all the rest. All those who favor it are considered fascists, Nazis.”

By Walter Block

Give credit where credit is due. The campus lefties are now whining, and they are doing an excellent job of it. Nay, superlative.

What is the complaint? It is that elected state officials, governors, and legislators are sticking their snouts where they do not belong. Namely, they have the audacity to dictate what should and should not be taught at colleges and universities and how they should be run.

Specifically, they have all but banned “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements as a requirement for hiring and promotions. When our friends on the left attempted to substitute “belonging” for DEI, the politicians gave the backs of their hands to that subterfuge as well.

Nor should we forget the meddling of the Supreme Court of the United States. Imagine! Those friends have banned Affirmative Action, the bedrock of socialist professors. Nor should we forget about grievance studies: black studies, queer studies, feminist studies, and all the rest. These, too, are under the gun by politicians who must be brought to heel.

Perhaps the leading target of this outrage, in the view of the parlor pinks, is Governor DeSantis of Florida, where “woke goes to die,” thank goodness. Their cri de coeur is that faculty in the Sunshine State are eyeing the exits. Well, bad cess to them in their new faculty posts. They will ruin their new intellectual homes as they have done from whence they are supposedly leaving. Their taunt is that inferior faculty will be hired in their places. And, indeed, there is some truth in that charge, at least in terms of formal credentials. The left has been so overwhelmingly powerful at our institutions of higher learning that they have been hugely successful in precluding from the professoriate—so much for “inclusion” —scholars who are not entirely “woke.”

Of course, intellectuals, other things equal, are far better able to determine what should and should not be taught in class than politicians and judges. But other things are hardly equal. This assumption only applies on the assumption that the scholars are open to all shades of opinion. As John Stuart Mill eloquently said: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.” If students have never even been acquainted with critiques of Marxism—and all too often they have not been on campus—they have been cheated.

The reality on most college and university campuses differs greatly from what outsiders think. Administrators and professors are open to diversity of race, sex, and sexual preference and pretty much to everyone under the sun except for straight white males. Intellectual diversity is to them like the cross to a vampire. It is evil, sexist, racist, ci-gendered, and all the rest. All those who favor it are considered fascists, Nazis.

As matters stand, the incursion of these “outside forces” is a vast improvement. The now-embittered economic and cultural Marxists started this intellectual war. When they were in the driver’s seat, all was well. They regard this comeuppance they are now suffering from as totally unjustified. It never would have occurred, had they not been so intent and successful in achieving an all but monopoly over what is taught, published, how hiring and promotion are determined, etc.

But now a word of caution for the “interlopers.”  It will do little good, say, to forbid the use of Rawls in class and insist on substituting Nozick. Ditto for replacing Marx with Mises or banning Myrdahl so that Hayek may be read instead. Ditto for substituting Sowell for Kendi.

No, the rot goes far deeper than that.

See the rest here

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