College-Town Blues
1st September 2023
Every time I survive a stressed-out trip to “State,” as we call it, I come home annoyed and grateful to live somewhere so unpretentious. I also wonder: do college towns attract liberals or beget them, and why is academia so rife with lefties?
As my father was one of them (an academic, not a lib) for many years, I asked him. His theory is that to make a name for yourself as a professor, you’re expected to discover something new, and unless you’re making breakthroughs in a lab, all the best ideas have already been thought of and expressed. So to get published, earn tenure, and so forth, academics must contradict truth and invent ideas that are “innovative,” even if they’re flat-out wrong. This theory would explain the number of false narratives peddled by so many college profs and the Democratic Party itself. (In 2020, Democratic professors outnumbered Republicans nine to one at top colleges.)
If you put a bunch of late-adolescent people in one place, and allow them to vote, you’re going to get late-adolescent (and arrested-adolescent, in the case of academics) policies foisted on the rest of the population. One of the distinguishing characteristics of adolescents in the modern world is the firm conviction that “wishing will make it so” and “yelling loud enough will get something done”, in which delusion there are a lot of venal apparatchiks ready to shove the cart along.