Chris Bray: Academia Pretends It Was Apolitical and Public-Spirited Before Trump Came Along

This is right smack dab on the damn money.

At my own university, the AAUP is holding a rally today that basically presupposes the attitude Bray describes. They think that DEI is an unmitigated, purely objective good that all right-thinking people--especially faculty--support. That universities are bastions of right-thinkingness because that means leftism. AND that ideological capture of academia is a myth...although they also think that every human institution is basically pure ideological capture--there is no such thing as anything else. To ideologically capture is human... But it's only the evil Dominant Culture that has ideologically captured anything ever. Western Civilization is The Man, aka The Oppressor. Academia has somewhat counteracted this, creating a somewhat liberated environment, but it's still almost entirely Dominant-Culture dominated. I suppose it'd be really genuinely politically correct only if it was pure, unmitigated CRT and DEI in every department and every class...

The thing is, the thought that academia might be ideologically captured and distorted by the left never really seems to even enter their heads. (I'm speaking here of academicians in the main, and AAUP types in the main--certainly not of our local AAUP-folk, who are a cut above the normal AAUP claptrap in my experience.) Part of the ideological capture is that the main opposing view is never even articulated on campus. The politically correct orthodoxy is damn near pervasive...but the most relevant other perspective just...isn't.