Samuel J. Abrams

Last year, a progressive student mob came for my job and the faculty and administrators of Sarah Lawrence College did not support me. This week, a student mob again encircled my office — this time because they craved viewpoint diversity.The media portrays America’s students as overwhelmingly ‘woke’ activists obsessed with social justice protests. In reality, Gen Z college students look far more positive. America’s students are intellectually curious, and they want more from college, than is offered by the progressive monoculture encouraged by some professors and many administrators.

Higher education is dominated by liberal professors and progressive impulses. Conservative professors like me are often apprehensive about teaching in the dominant method, lecture based classes. It’s in the humble seminar, with students and professor debating around a table, that viewpoint diversity can thrive, and discussions of conservative thought survive.Colleagues tell me that they are regularly afraid of the scenario when their class spirals out of control and blows up. In the safe-space, trigger warning, micro-aggression climate of the campus, a professor’s intentions and statements are easily mischaracterized.

The freedom to debate ideas in our nation’s colleges and universities is under attack. That much is well known. The only group on campus that can push back against the tide of censorship and silencing of speakers on campus are the students themselves. Higher education is supposed to be a place of intellectual discomfort, and students should object when their institutions silence dissenting ideas. The latest round of administrative overreach and censorship in response to unpopular views comes courtest of Middlebury College in Vermont and is instructive. Middlebury’s administration canceled a lecture last week that would have featured Ryszard Legutko, a controversial professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Poland and a member of the European Parliament.

Sarah Lawrence College claims that its mission is to graduate students who are, ‘diverse in every definition of the word.’ Unfortunately, recent events which have been in the national eye, suggest otherwise. And this story involves me. Seizing on an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times a few months ago, in which I questioned the lack of ideological balance of the school’s extracurricular programming, a group of student protesters calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition labeled me a racist misogynist. They demanded that my ‘position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color.

Universities are not the calmest of places just now, what with fights over free speech and the endless claims of harassment and intimidation. Add in the crippling debts from a college education, and many students might be wondering why they bothered at all. But never mind the on-campus animosity and rivalries, a university education ultimately has a beneficial effect on those who go through it – and not just in a financial sense. It make us more trusting and optimistic about the intentions of other people. That is the clear conclusion of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey on Community and Society, which I co-authored. The survey asked graduates aged 24 and over three questions about interpersonal relations.

While so much of higher-education in the United States is dominated by politically active and overwhelmingly liberal college administrators – the ever growing professional class of administrators who call the shots outside the classroom – it turns out that that not every college looks like those in New England which has a 25:1 ratio of liberal to conservative administrators. As warnings about the diminution of viewpoint diversity become louder, understanding where and why there are some schools that are not completely progressive in orientation should be better understood and one explanation for this is geography: America’s institutions of higher education are deeply embedded in and influenced by the local communities where they are spatially situated.

It’s well known that the question of who can speak and on what topics has become a flashpoint for controversy on our nation’s college and university campuses. I experienced intimidation firsthand after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in which I questioned some of seemingly liberal, lopsided programming at Sarah Lawrence College (one of the most proudly progressive schools, where I am a tenured professor). I suggested that more balance was needed given our polarized times and reiterated my concerns about collegiate ideological echo chambers. Within hours, my office door and surrounding corridor was vandalized. Pictures of my family were taken and bumper stickers that I had placed on the door to create a welcoming environment for students were stripped off.