Brian Leiter has a comment up on this thoroughly bizarre article at Tech Central Station: Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?

The Tech Central article is a stupid, ill-informed rant by one Edward Feser that begins with this blanket description of what universities teach:

• capitalism is inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and impoverishing;
• socialism, whatever its practical failures, is motivated by the highest ideals and that its luminaries -- especially Marx -- have much to teach us;
• globalization hurts the poor of the Third World;
• natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and that human industrial activity is an ever-increasing threat to "the environment";
• most if not all psychological and behavioral differences between men and women are "socially constructed" and that male-female differences in income, representation in various professions, and the like are mostly the result of "sexism";
• the pathologies of the underclass in the United States are due to racism and that the pathologies of the Third World are due to the lingering effects of colonialism;
• Western civilization is uniquely oppressive, especially to women and "people of color," and that its products are spiritually inferior to those of non-Western cultures;
• traditional religious belief, especially of the Christian sort, rests on ignorance of modern scientific advances, cannot today be rationally justified, and persists on nothing more than wishful thinking;
• traditional moral scruples, especially regarding sex, also rest on superstition and ignorance and have no rational justification; and so on and on.

He further claims that not only is every one of the above taught unchallenged, but that every one is demonstrably false.

I call bullshit.

The premise of his entire article is false. There is at least a small germ of truth to every one of those points, and they should be mentioned and discussed in the university classroom; and some are indisputably true (at least, if we confine ourselves to only rational dispute), such as the point about depletion of natural resources. Most importantly, while some individuals might subscribe to some of those points wholeheartedly and to the exclusion of disagreement, within the modern university as a whole there is generally a far greater breadth of opinion than the author is willing to admit, and there is considerable healthy discussion. Yes, there are many Marxists in academe; there are also many unabashed capitalists thriving here. I don't know of any economics or political science or history departments that can be tarred with the excesses of his first three claims, for instance. I've seen public discussions of all of them, and usually that involves presenting all sides of the arguments (I've also seen one-sided polemics, but they are not confined to the Left, and in my subjective experience, are more often displayed by the Right...as in this article.)

The real killer to his whole argument, though, is that the author is an academic.

The whole thing is dim-witted twaddle, so I'll not bother to comment on the bulk of it. His conclusion is a bit much, though.

Indeed, it is only very recently in modernity that it has become something of the norm: specifically, with the great frontal attack on received ideas about human nature and society represented by late 19^th- and early 20^th-century thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

The astute reader will have noticed that, at least as I have described the situation, the era of common sense coincides with the medieval Age of Faith, while the thinkers cited as heralding the era of perversity are the great representatives of modern atheism, a kind of Four Horsemen of the secular Apocalypse. And here, I believe, lies the answer to our riddle. For if the great minds of the Middle Ages saw their mission as upholding a religious view of the world, so too, would I argue, do the intellectuals of the modern world. Here Rothbard was, in his own somewhat crude way, the closest to the truth: the modern professoriate is best understood as a kind of priesthood, and its religion is Leftism.

That first bit is revealing, lumping Darwin in with what he clearly considers a gang of failed philosophers. That's Philip Johnson's tack, a rhetorical game in which he tries to condemn a thriving, successful idea by associating it with others his audience will find repugnant. By that line alone I can tell the author is a clueless, conservative twit.

The rest is a little surprising. It's rare to see a conservative actually admit that his ideal is a return to the Middle Ages, so at least we can credit him with a slight bit of honesty. The rest is total crap. I am an outspoken atheist, and I can say for a fact that I am a minority in academe; the majority of my colleagues are perfectly comfortable in their religious beliefs, and even I have no interest in trying to change the religious beliefs of my peers or my students.

His claim that we are pushing a religion of leftism is simply ludicrous. It is true that a good liberal arts education involves encountering a wide range of ideas, including all of the ones he listed; that, I think, is a virtue. What he advocates is a diminishment of the intellectual atmosphere of the university, a reduction to just those few ideas he resolutely believes are absolutely true, and a restoration of the university's pre-Enlightenment role as a promulgator of dogma—because his ideal is a religious straightjacket does not mean that that must be the liberal goal as well.