Washington DC (January 17, 2006) – America’s greatness has been always based -not only on the richness of its natural resources and the ingenuity of its people- but also on the power of its free and democratic society. Political differences were fought in the arena of ideas.Unfortunately, nowadays, a civil discourse among Americans with different political affiliation has become almost impossible. It has degraded to vitriolic personal smear as the recent Alito hearings demonstrated. Of all places, the American universities are where political diversity is practically no longer tolerated, especially when the dissenting opinion is from the conservative side.
Michael Barone illustrated this sad situation when he compared the ivory Princeton University and the neighboring Hamilton Township.“Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion. You can go door-to-door in Hampton Township and find people feeling free to voice every opinion across the political spectrum. At Princeton, you will not find many feeling free to dissent from the Bush-equals-Hitler orthodoxy.”
Let’s hope that a new young generation of politically open-minded students and faculty is confident enough, intellectually skillful enough, to transform the American universities backto the constructive arenas of ideas that once were the foundation for America’s greatness.
