I generally avoid quoting silly things coming out of academia. There’s too much of it for one lonely blogger (or even a dozen communal ones), and, besides, it’s too depressing. But every now and then something is uttered or written that is so … something, maybe revealing, that it must be quoted, and Eric Ambler of The Hatemonger’s Quarterly just sent me one.
In a recent post, he cites an article from the Raleigh-Durham Independent Weekly that views the demand for intellectual diversity on campus as a right wing plot. One of the authorities quoted in the article is Catherine Lutz, a former professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Lutz said the following about those who complain of left wing orthodoxy on campus:
“What they’re trying to do is take back the last institution in this country that doesn’t have a complete right-wing agenda because it’s founded on the notion of free inquiry, knowledge and research—and has protections in place for those reasons.”
Ms. Lutz, however, may be a bit behind the times. As I argued in my immediately preceding post, many campus progressives are now emphasizing that at least the elite, selective institutions of higher education are themselves “bastions of privilege,” as former Princeton president Bowen puts it.
