Excellent WSJ Op-Ed on Ideological Conformity

Colleges such as Dartmouth are obsessed with political correctness.

On Sunday 11, the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent opinion piece by Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse on the problems created at universities by obsessive political correctness. While she did not specifically mention Dartmouth or the “Phiesta” PC disaster, her argument applies as well to Dartmouth as it does to the controversies over Ray Kelly’s canceled speech at Brown and Condoleezza Rice’s at Rutgers that she mentions. Essentially, Wisse believes that since the 1960s, American institutions of higher learning have gradually become culturally and ideologically stagnant and oppressive, with any sort of conservative or alternative viewpoint frequently held as ignorant or spiteful. She argues that this has produced a culture where students think the correct path is to protest and force the cancellation of a speaker with whom they disagree on an ideological basis, rather than taking the opportunity to hear and learn from someone as accomplished and respected as Condoleezza Rice (or a culture in which a college administration thinks the complaints of one offended student are worth canceling a major fundraising event). The full article can be accessed here.