Jeff,

Your misappropriation of the details is grandiose enough to deserve my attention. After re-reading your opinion, I think you might win my coveted “Idiot of the Week Award”–normally reserved for bad blogs . . . . The core of your argument is that everyone is “Liberal” in Universities, and it is not representative of the real world. The rest of your editorial logically dissects the results of this “imbalance.”

Please don’t get offended if I use a kindergarten teacher’s tone. I think you are an idiot for not seeing these fundamental tenets. I’ll try to suppress it, but I will use 6th-grader language in order to reach you.

Let’s begin with the concept of the University. So, the University is a place where people go to learn. One primary reason for attending college is to make changes: to your own life, to figure out how to change/shape your future industry, to challenge your personal assumptions, and to learn how to think critically in the future. I have a very good friend who begins this argument with, “The definition of a Liberal is any person who seeks to change [. . . . ]” The institution itself is a place that fosters that change. The relationship between Liberals (seekers of change), and the University is a very tangible one. Perhaps there are 6 to 8% of students (to use your number) who are “Conservative” and already know everything. They might be attending University to simply get a paper degree that certifies their knowledge. The rest of the students, however, are there to learn.

In order to make my motives transparent, I must establish my biases. I am an academic who is no longer in academia. I work and live and get funded by my own business, and the fruits of my own labor. But, I vehemently (oooh, sorry, big word–means: aggressively) will defend the Institution of Academia and the role it plays and needs to play in our world. Another friend in Academia states to his students a very succinct definition of the purpose of Academia: “It is my job as a Professor to show you ‘Utopia,’ or the perfect-world version of our subjects. The real world already exists. It is up to you, the students, to find a balance between the two. If I were to teach you the ‘real world’ ways, you would certainly be skewed in how you translate the materials you learn here to the future world.” While you, Jeff, want the debate between Conservative ideals and Liberal ones to take place within Academia, I believe that is a recipe for disaster. The debate will certainly take place outside of the “Ivory Tower” for the remainder of your life, but if you never learn or practice the skills of questioning the fundamental tenets or your reality you will not have the ability to question any ideals–conservative or liberal.

Lastly, I have an economic argument to challenge your “alarms” that have sounded about Academia. Perhaps the reason why most of Academia voted for Democrats is the history that the party has for financially supporting Academia–and the history the Republican party has for NOT financially supporting the institution. I live in California and voted to recall former Governor Davis (a Democrat that supported Academia heavily), and I voted for now Governor Schwarzenegger because he was, in my opinion, the best leader for our state. One of the first ways that he trimmed the California budget, however, was to cut funding for the California State University system. The 21 campus system is no longer in an expansion mode–they are reducing the number of students they educate each year. Less American’s will have a college education as a result.

At a Federal level, our Conservative President or Ultra-Conservative President, or Extremist President, or whatever President has just recently made a HUGE cut in the Student Loan program. Again, a Conservative choice that is going to reduce the number of college degrees in the good ole USA.

Perhaps the Conservative agenda does not find a home on college campuses because conservatives do not want to pay for Academia. If University Professors use the same logic as the rest of the nation, they need to vote in a way that supports and maintains their economic well-being. Namely, if Academia shrinks, they might lose their job, or not get a raise for cost-of-living increases, or might not have as many students in their classes. If we were to zoom out and take a look at the grand scheme of things, perhaps the Liberal agenda on college campuses is not too dissimilar to the Conservative one in the rest of nation. After all, it just may be the economy, stupid.