As a life-long conservative who has observed the great right/left Battle of Academia first as a teenager then as a college student then as a resident of the largest college town in the world, Cambridge/Boston I think I can say, with a sense of relief, that the battle has been lost and we can lay down our arms. Every decade, when the academic regime became intolerably oppressive the right on campus would find some outside allies and fight so as to gain some measure of breathing space; every decade this breathing space got eaten away. 30 years ago a small foundation started offering seed money to conservative students to start campus newspapers and journals. The amount of angst and hysteria that the Dartmouth review, The Harvard Salient, the Tufts Primary Source could stir up was quite impressive. Whole print runs would be trashed with the tacit approval of administrations. Many prominent conservative journalists and thinkers are alumni of these papers. Many a student found the campus conservative paper an oasis of sanity. Did they change the tenor of the college campus at all? I am fairly sure some the commentary and covers they printed back in the 90s would not be tolerated today. They (we) lost.

But how hollow is the victory for the Lefte? With the Long March Through the Institutions complete these institutions are disintegrating and are soon to become as valuable to the left as Moscow in the hands of Napoleon’s army. Conservative’s should do all that is possible to hasten the disintegration. There are a few schools that are in the hands conservatives (or at least serious educators) such as Hillsdale, St John’s, Aquinas, Grove City and others. Being somewhat detached form the Higher Ed ecosystem they will probably survive the deluge. Hell, quite a lot of them are already denied federal funds and have had make up the money privately. But for the most part the College campus should be closed and emptied of students who should be made to rely on the real world and private sources to train and/or educate themselves. Conservative should strive above all to keep these independent resources free from Federal and elite control for this will be the next project of the left–just at they are trying to put the Internet under the yoke of the U.N.

This liberating disintegration is occuring, as everybody knows, in any number of areas of human activity, such as journalism and entertainment. To give an example mentioned here: Yes the SFWoA and the Sci Fi publishing establishment in general is in the grip of political correctness but sales from self-publishing have equaled if not exceeded sales from traditional houses.

For a very long time we have been fighting a rearguard action. Time to change our tactics nay, our whole strategy. This blog, after all, is an example of that.

BTW, as well as the Bloom book, there are many great writings on this topic going back to Bill Buckley’s first book in 1951. I highly reccomend Tom Wolfe’s essay “The Intelligent Coed’s guide …” from the late 70s.

Edward Wagner

It’s activists who think in terms of paradigm shift deliberately applying a proven effective method.

Ingratitude, thy name is leftism.

Holder went to Columbia, not Cornell. From Wiki:

While at Columbia, Holder was a member of the Student Afro-American Society, which staged a non-confrontational occupation of the ROTC lounge and demanded that it be renamed the Malcolm X Lounge.

That’s quite a different situation, although related.

One of the big issues was so-called “academic freedom.” Just like today, the protestors didn’t want people they disagreed with to be heard. In many, many ways what we are seeing today reminds me very much of the 60s and 70s.

We found that the STEM students were our best bet for recruits and that they disagreed with and disliked the protestors as much as we did. I would wager the same is true today.