Throughout 203 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating agianst the war in Iraq, right? Well no: students at UCLA, Michigan, and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest..afirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less. The principal, the protestors observed, was just that governing university admissons practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for monority students, oblivious to the incoherece of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.
The protests schocked the mainstream press, but close observers of America's college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, comservatives critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to Mom and Dad's own values.
But the Left's long dominion over the university-the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed-is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and adminsitration offices, of course. It's coming fromt he self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers......
more.............www.manhattan-institute.org/cfml/printable.cfm?id=1735
The protests schocked the mainstream press, but close observers of America's college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, comservatives critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to Mom and Dad's own values.
But the Left's long dominion over the university-the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed-is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and adminsitration offices, of course. It's coming fromt he self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers......
more.............www.manhattan-institute.org/cfml/printable.cfm?id=1735
