(from National Review):
By David French
One has to truly step into the world of “elite” higher education to understand its isolation and its sad intellectual mediocrity. The men and women who populate our most culturally influential universities quite simply don’t understand America and its citizens. They view dissenters from the academic mainstream as a toxic combination of malicious and ignorant.
Defenders of the status quo tend to claim that this is simply the natural order of things. Conservatives, the thinking goes, self-select out of the academy because they’re more interested in commercial gain, less interested in intellectual pursuits, and repelled by the spirit of “open inquiry” and devotion to “critical thinking” that (allegedly) dominate higher education.
In a testament to how bad things have gotten, it comes as a shock that two new studies from inside the academy should employ truly open inquiry and critical thinking to posit a different, more plausible explanation, and detail its costs: Conservatives don’t self-select out of the academy; they’re culled from it by discrimination. CONTINUE READING HERE