In a guest column for David Horowitz's frontpagemag.com, liberal students from The University of Michigan deplore the illiberal climate of their campus. The hostile reception Horowitz received when he spoke there last Tuesday occasions the column, which offers a rare, balanced look at the intolerance and anti-intellectualism that plagues campus liberalism these days (and that does so, following a Marcusean logic that many employ but few can actually identify, in the name of creating tolerance). The authors note the University's habit of inviting to campus only liberal speakers--Donna Shalala, Jonathan Kozol, and reparations activist Randall Robinson have all appeared recently on the University's dime, while Horowitz, who was sponsored by two conservative student groups, did not even warrant an official introduction. And the authors go on to call for greater tolerance on the part of campus liberals, and the wider educational exposure that goes with it. As they rightly point out, if you want to oppose a point of view, you need to know whereof you speak. But left-leaning liberals do not as a rule read the work of conservative thinkers--not even the Nobel laureates--and thus cripple themselves as citizens and as human beings. It's a biased bad habit that is built into the educational system at this point. How many self-professed marxist theorists have ever heard of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, let alone read them? How many hip deconstructionists have studied John Searle? How many feminists have seriously perused the work of Christina Hoff Sommers or Daphne Patai? How many agitators for reparations have read the work of conservative black scholars such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele--work that not only discounts reparations as unwise and hypocritical, but also opposes affirmative action? Students, check your syllabi and see what's missing. Ask your professors to build a more varied philosophical diet into your curriculum. And when they refuse--as many will do--get thee to the library and do what the best minds always ultimately do: teach yourself.

On a related note, a piece called "Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go There!" in today's New York Times does a fine job of describing the tendency of today's undergrads to shy away from intellectual debate, exploring how a desire to display tolerance, a fear of offending, a focus on personal advancement rather than on ideas, and a debilitating relativism all contribute to a kind of insular quiescence that does not bode well for the future of democracy. The article cites some astute observations by Amanda Anderson, Professor of English at John Hopkins and author of the forthcoming The Way We Argue Now. "It's as though there's no distinction between the person and the argument, as though to criticize an argument would be injurious to the person," she notes. "Because so many forms of scholarly inquiry today foreground people's lived experience, there's this kind of odd overtactfulness. In many ways, it's emanating from a good thing, but it's turned into a disabling thing .... To keep democracy vital, it's important that students learn to integrate debate into their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive way, when they're in school." Wise words from a wise Victorianist. Three cheers, Professor Anderson, for bringing John Stuart Mill to bear on the present moment, and for the cool Trollope reference.