A reader writes about the difference between college then and college now, and laments the difficulty of finding a college that will actually deliver the kind of education he wants his kids to have:

...this reader ofÝyour blog happens to be the parent of two boys who are a junior and a sophomore in highÝschool. All too soon they will be going to college. I can't help but worry about the extent to which the intellectual dishonesty, academic trendiness, and doctrinaireÝpostmodernismÝyou chronicle carries over into the instruction and evaluation of undergraduates.Ý

One of the things that bothers me the most is the fact that, based on all the evidence I glean from your blog and from other sources, I can't use my own college experience to inform my decisions about my sons, and where to send them to college. I went to Dartmouth College from 1968 to 1972. I was a conservative, at least by the standards of the campus (although I tended to keep my own counsel), and the campus was certainly aflame with political activism in those years. In the spring of 1969, and again in spring 1970, college administration buildings were taken over by students in protests ultimately related to the Vietnam War (although the proximate cause in at least one of those takeovers was ROTC on campus). The campus was shut down in spring 1970 due to the Kent State protest and subsequent killings --Ýalthough I was unaffected because I was in France at the time with a group of Dartmouth students (one of whom told me one day about his stay in jail a year earlier,Ýwhich had resulted from his part in the spring 1969 administration building takeover).

Notwithstanding all this, however, I don't remember my education being politicized in the manner described by you, and your correspondents in your blog, as being current today. Certainly politics was ever present, and campus property was frequently used for rallies and for heart-felt (and almost always liberal) speeches by both faculty and students. But "Truth" itself was not yet considered the malleable instrument it is conceivedÝto beÝtoday (except maybe by Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, and then only as a straw man to be refuted). In the introductory political science (at Dartmouth, "Government" department)Ýsurvey course we were assigned and read the classics of the Western tradition -- Plato's Republic (the whole thing), Machiavelli's The Prince (the whole thing)Ý, Rousseau's Social Contract (again, the whole thing), etc; we were instructed in the conservative tradition with readings from Calhoun (John C., that is), DeMaistre, and Doestoevski, as well as the Socialist tradition (with readings by Marx and Franz Fanon, among others) and the liberal tradition (Locke's entire Second Treatise and James Mill, among others). I passed out of the English requirement, but most freshmen were required toÝread Milton's Paradise Lost. I myself took an electiveÝcourse in Shakespeare, in which we read thirteen plays and were given the opportunity to become familiar with secondary sources such as Bradley and Goddard (and were lectured, I might add, by a truly excellent faculty, about whose political opinions I do not, to this day, have any inkling).

Should one or both of my sons succeed in getting admittedÝto Dartmouth -- or any small liberal arts school --ÝI wonder whether they will get the same sort of even-handed education, given the contempt in which the bedrock concept of "truth" seems to be held in academia today. I have no problem with a faculty whose politics, on the whole, disagree with mine; I do have a problem with a faculty in which a substantial number think "truth" is a function of those politics. This orientation on the part of faculty distorts the choice of content to teach in the first place (because it overemphasizes the last 50 toÝ100 years of intellectual history, at the expense of the previous millenia) and it renders the evaluation process -- from the point of view of the student, anyway -- completely arbitrary, from any objective viewpoint. (The student can, of course, render it non-arbitrary by expressly acknowledging that a given course is an exercise in political indoctrination, and then simply kowtowing to that reality. But what then of actual education?) And although my elder son and I haven't really started the college search process, I strongly suspect that there's absolutely nothing in any of the application literature provided to prospective students that gives any clue as to whether the bedrock educational mission of a given college has been compromised in the manner I've described.

I don't ask you to change the focus of your blog -- but it would certainly be appreciated if you could devote an entry or two to the clues that you, as an insider, might provide to outsiders such as me, which will help us figure out whether undergraduate education at a given college, or at departments at a given college,Ýhas been compromised in the fashion described.

Myers has lots of good advice about how to assess the political and intellectual climate of a given school. Even if you disagree about whether some things are problems (co-ed dorm bathrooms, for example, or racy film screenings at orientation), the guide is a great model for how to begin to evaluate a school. To Myers' suggestions, I would add: read the student newspaper (which ought to be online) to find out what's happening on campus and to see how students and administrators think about what's happening on campus; use Google to search for recent news--or scandals--about the schools that interest you; and become a regular reader of websites that focus on issues in higher education. Some of the best of these are Invisible Adjunct, Discriminations, Number Two Pencil, SCSU Scholars, and NoIndoctrination.org; you should also keep close tabs on FIRE's website, and on its subsidiary sites, speechcodes.org and thefireguides.org.

I'm not a parent, and many heads are better than one. Additional thoughts from readers, particularly from parents, college students, and recent college grads are welcome. I'll post updates when and as readers write in.