I hope that, like me, you read the Letters to the Editor of your daily paper and, occasionally, wonder how one or the other happened to have gotten selected for publication. After all, my "local" paper, the Washington Post, gets many such letters in a day to sift through.
So every once in a while -- shoot, pretty much every day -- one gets published that gets your attention, and not in the good way. Rather, it reminds you why the letters to the editor are positioned in the Post on the editorial page and not the op-ed page. They are controlled so as to portray a set of opinions consistent with the Post's left-wing views. Else, how do you explain this?
On Sunday, a letter appeared from someone named Kathie Sowell of Vienna, Virginia, positioned squarely at the top of the letters column where all could start their reading by seeing it. The letter was in response to an editorial by the op-ed columnist Kathleen Parker that dismantled the idea of "safe zones" in colleges and universities where students' precious ears could be protected from disagreeable (i.e., conservative) opinions.
Miss Sowell wrote, after acknowledging the idiocy of "trigger warnings" and "safe rooms", that "... in blaming only liberals, [Miss Parker] is using tunnel vision. The ironically-named Liberty University is a bastion of right-wing though and speech police. Trigger warnings are moot where no contrary thoughts are encountered. [Miss Parker] also seemed upset that liberal universities don't invite commencement speakers whose philosophies and values differ from those "common at the university" [quotation marks mine]. Neither do conservative universities, and that is their right ... As far as I know, Liberty University has never invited Barney Frank as a commencement speaker, and [UCLA] has probably never invited Rush Limbaugh. Free speech will survive."
Oh, there is so, so much wrong with that, and even more wrong with it being published.
Let us start with the trivial. One example is given of what she calls a "conservative university" and, while there are surely others, the number pale in comparison to those overwhelmed by liberal dogma. Not only is the percentage of college professors who are leftists much larger than conservative professors across the USA, it is actually getting more so and quickly.
In 2009, a survey cited in the link showed that 55.8% of university professors in the USA identified as "liberal" or "far left", while only 15.9% claimed to be "conservative" or "far right." By 2013, a year before the country voted in Republican Senate to go along with a Republican House of Representatives, the number to the "left" or "far left" had risen to 62.7% of all professors, and the conservative side had shrunk to only 11.9%.
But no, her letter cited only one such school in the face of a preponderance of intolerant leftists (but I repeat myself) in tenured spots, and a much larger number of institutions leaning to the port side.
But even that's not the biggest issue.
No, the problem is who the schools are, that avoid or cancel conservative speakers. Liberty University is a private institution whose mission (here it is if you'd like) is to train up students in a Christian belief system, to go on to "... follow their chosen vocations as callings to glorify God, and fulfill the Great Commission." That is why Liberty University exists.
There is nothing leftist in the stated missions of the Ivy League schools and no compelling reason to omit conservative speakers -- or to avoid hiring conservative professors. And far, far more than that, is Miss Sowell's own example, UCLA. UCLA is a branch of the University of California system, a state-funded and state-run institution which, by its existence as a branch of government, has no business whatsoever preventing speakers with conservative views from expressing them on campus! Certainly they don't have to invite Rush Limbaugh or any other particular person, but their commencement speakers, over any few years, should be reflecting both sides evenly.
How about Condoleezza Rice forced to pull out of a commencement speech at Rutgers for political pressure, as if she was planning to make a political speech? That's not a private school either -- we're talking about Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, to use the full title. We're not talking about a private university with a mission derived from faith; Rutgers is a government institution, and like UCLA, Cal-Berkeley, Florida State and the University of Missouri at St. Louis, should be presenting a balanced education, left and right-side opinions, and decide who its commencement speakers are so as to present both sides.
But no, the example that the Post decided was a good letter, was one that attempted to provide moral equivalence between a rare conservative institution which is a private Christian university, and the preponderance of universities, liberal almost all, including private liberal-arts schools which by heritage should expose all views and, most importantly, public institutions which have no business slanting all their speakers to the left.
I've always seen through the way the balance of the opinion pages in the Post has been managed, even which days one can expect to find which views in letters. But really, they at least need to insist that their letter-writers make an essay-worthy point grounded in facts. No "hands up, don't shoot", and no moral equivalencies where one equals 1,000.
I think I'll write a letter.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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