Welcome back to campus

Here’s another back-to-school question about universities: Why are conservatives sadly underrepresented among graduate students? One thought: Many don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be force-fed propaganda, and they fear that in academia they won’t be free to research and write as they wish.

Jason Morgan, a conservative Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gives some examples of gratuitous attacks on conservatives that he’s encountered during his studies. For instance, Terry Eagleton’s Ideology gives superhuman powers to Margaret Thatcher, who converted “the moderately pleasant people who populated [England] into a thoroughly nasty bunch of callous, self-seeking oafs. Unless most of the British have become completely hideous and disgusting characters, Thatcherism has failed in its aims.”

Morgan also quotes from a review of a book about Japanese peasant revolts, in which political historian Roger Brown insults author Richard Smethurst by calling him “Reaganesque … like the Great Communicator, Smethurst is not shy about pointing to the Japanese equivalents of the leading economic indicators in order to make his point that farmers never had it so good. Also like the American president, Smethurst neatly avoids the bad news about the economy. …”

Morgan summarizes a common academic view: “Please do not hold Marx or Marxists responsible for Marxism. … So communism killed a hundred million or so people. Big deal! … Besides, our Marxism is sophisticated. We look at superstructures and we read Adorno and we toss and turn at night over the heretical Gallicisms of Althusser. No execution squads. No Holodomor [Ukraine’s Stalin-made famine]. No unpleasant gulags or one-way tickets to Siberia.”

Morgan concludes, “Ever wonder why enrollments are dropping in the humanities? Perhaps some of the tradition-inventing, guns-and-God-clinging rubes that the professoriate loves to insult have figured out that they can skip the two-hundred-thousand-dollar college loan and just get some guy sitting next to them on the subway to say ‘reality is whatever you want it to be.’”