2016 Oct 5^th

Dr. Thomas Sowell offers us a “Peek behind the ‘Academic Curtain.’” The title should have been a, “Peek behind some selected Academic Curtains” because Sowell carefully confines himself to Ivy League schools and a few other elite universities.

This is not a new rant for Sowell; periodically, he feels compelled to tell us how upscale schools deny their students the splendid right wing wisdom that would move them toward a sound right wing political view, or even a view not so leftist leaning.

Sowell has a near reverence for the Federalist Papers. This is interesting on two counts at least: First, Federalist paper #84 specifically argues against the necessity for a Bill of Rights, which are the first ten amendments to the constitution. Accepting that argument there would be no Second Amendment and a very upset NRA.

Sowell excoriates the Ivy League for excluding the Federalist Papers from reading lists and including the Communist Manifesto; but many of the Federalist papers are aimed specifically at the American government while the Communist Manifesto is much more broadly targeted. Then Sowell’s rant about these liberal Ivy League institutions come up against the fact that the Federalist Society, the premier organization pushing a wider belief in the political philosophy of Federalism was founded by students at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago in 1982.

Sowell’s own bias is obvious. There are colleges where Democrats are demonized but Sowell can’t bring himself to mention these. At Biola University in Los Angeles, the issue for discussion recently was whether or not it was possible to be a Democrat and a Christian. (Biola University was once the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Perhaps they found it helpful to have a more secularized name for their institution.)

When a faculty member applies for tenure at Biola he, or she, must include a description of how their Christian faith informs their scholarship. It seems obvious that there will only be Christians on their faculty, and that there will be some interesting applications for tenure from those in the mathematics department whose field is Riemannian manifolds. But Biola University enrolls only a little over 6 thousand students. What about larger schools?

Liberty University has an enrollment of nearly 85 thousand students. That’s a higher enrollment than all of the Ivy League colleges put together. Liberty University has decided that its Democratic student organization no longer has a place on campus, Why is that? That’s because the values of that political organization do not agree with the values of Liberty University. Perhaps Sowell can show us a left wing college or university that has removed a Republican student organization because the college doesn’t agree with the Republican organization’s principles. I’ll bet he can’t name even one.