The Closing of the Collegiate Mind

Living as I do in a college community, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that the University was once a bastion of academic freedom but now is one of the great enforcers of correctness--political, sexual, literary, cultural. (My big problem with the University is that it takes up too much room!) Ruth Wisse puts it nicely in an op-ed entitled "The Closing of the Collegiate Mind":

In Nigeria, Islamists think nothing of seizing hundreds of schoolgirls for the crime of aspiring to an education. Here in the United States, the educated class thinks nothing of denying an honorary degree to a fearless Muslim woman who at peril of her life, and in the name of liberal democracy, has insisted on exposing such outrages to the light. The struggle for freedom is universal; would that our universities were on its side.

(Wisse teaches at Harvard, and she has tenure. Wonder of wonders, she's a conservative.)