Dec 4^th

Thomas Sowell is upset because of what he calls the intolerance shown for dissenting political views on American campuses. He is particularly aggrieved at the administrations of various Ivy League colleges for caving in to student’s sensitivities.  Harkening back to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) of the late sixties, he refers to those protesters as “campus storm troopers” but finds the University of Chicago praiseworthy for “standing up to them.” His own doctorate in economics happens to be from the University of Chicago; it must be a heavy burden for him to admit that President Barack Obama taught constitutional law at his university for about twelve years. He never mentions that fact.

It is not easy for African-American students attending Princeton University to tolerate the fact that President Woodrow Wilson, a past president of Princeton and a past President of the United States was a world class bigot who, once he got in the White House, proceeded to “cleanse” the government rolls of Black workers. This action caused enormous hardship for many families. That, and his praise for the Ku Klux Klan make the reverence for his memory at Princeton hard to bear for many students regardless of color. It’s easy to dismiss those concerns and simply say that he was a man of his times, but he wasn’t, because the previous President, William Taft, or Theodore Roosevelt before him, had hired these bmen. Woodrow Wilson’s bigotry was obviously an anomaly and he was not a product of his times.

Sowell goes on to give high praise to a book, “Choosing the Right College,” an evaluation of many colleges on the basis of their “ideological intolerance.” Included are the book’s author’s opinions about how tolerant each rated college is to dissenting opinions. Most of the Ivy League schools get red marks signifying intolerance. As you might expect, the University of Chicago gets a green light and Sowell has written a resounding recommendation for the book on Amazon!

There are a good many lesser known colleges that probably should also be included in this book but are not, colleges that need have no worry about dissenting opinions; these are the fundamentalist and evangelical institutions that carefully screen their entering students lest anyone be admitted who might not be compatible with the college’s mission. Biola University, formerly the Bible college of Los Angeles, Is not included in the book Sowell recommends. Biola’s first requirement of any applicant is that he or she “must be an Evangelical believer in the Christian faith.” This is not a tiny school; its enrollment is oversix thousand students. With this rigorous entrance screening it is vanishingly unlikely that Biola students will cause the administration any problems.

There are many colleges and universities just like Biola, and it is unlikely that with their intense focus on careful student selection, that the issue of any divergent opinion would ever arise. One of these, Letourneau University, recently got some publicity when it banned its student athletes from supporting gay marriage. Perhaps their admissions officer needs to review the entrance requirements.