The Wrong Way to Save Academia
28th November 2017
Someone once said, “Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they don’t.” We’re supposed to think that life is self-correcting, that it’s darkest before the dawn.
That’s a comforting thought. Problem is, it encourages a false optimism, especially about our universities. Go back 50 years, and liberals outnumbered conservatives in the academy by 3 to 1. Now it’s 12 to 1. In some departments, like history, it’s 30 to 1.
So if you think things are self-righting, you might expect that we’d snap back to a 3-to-1 ratio. But that’s not going to happen.