Illogic Primer Quotes Clippings Books and Bibliography Paper Trails Links Film

Ruth R. Wisse on Freedom and American Universities

"The Closing of the Collegiate Mind" at The Wall Street Journal (May 11, 2014).

Because conservative students do not take over buildings or drown others out with their shouting, instructors feel free to mock conservatives in the classroom, and administrators pay scant attention when their posters are torn down or their sensibilities offended. As a tenured professor who does not decline the label “conservative,” I benefit from this imbalance by getting to know some of the feistiest students on campus. ¶ But these students need and deserve every encouragement from outside their closed and claustrophobic environs. … 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.