The fall semester is but weeks away. Between now and Labour Day, I'll put finishing touches on course outlines, buy two dress shirts, and prepare to endure another year of conservatives complaining about being silenced on campus.

I got an early taste of the complaint this summer. Responding to an op-ed I published in this newspaper, a Spec reader wrote that on today's campuses, "it is difficult to find a conservative view on anything."

The claim is so preposterous you'd think ignoring it would be easy. A leading U.S.-based industry magazine, "Inside Higher Ed," recently reported that "conservative students and faculty members are not only surviving but thriving in academe." The problem is that the myth of conservative persecution is repeated so often, and so aggressively, it has taken on a kind of common-sense.

Celebrity professors like Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, and other conservatives are strongly influential in political debates on and off campus. A colleague of mine in Laurier's Liberal Arts faculty is running for the far-right People's Party of Canada in the upcoming federal election. I assure you his views are readily available on campus, not to mention covered favourably in Breitbart news. Every university has its share of conservative professors, and they're not known for keeping quiet.

Of course, conservatism is not strictly about membership in this or that political party, or feeling certain ways about hot button issues. Conservatism is a worldview that believes social hierarchies are both inevitable and beneficial. It doesn't matter whether you call yourself a Tory or a free-market liberal: it's ultimately conservative to venerate capitalist institutions that structure society around inequality.

Most academic disciplines are oriented around conservatism. Look at business schools and economics departments. At my university, as in many institutions, the business school is by far the largest, best resourced, and most powerful unit. The point of a business school is to develop ideas, workers, and managers to serve the market economy. You can be in favour or opposed to capitalism's profit-driven, hierarchical model of society; but a discipline whose core mission is to reproduce capitalism is undeniably conservative.

Conservative ideals are reinforced whenever a course takes for granted the supremacy of the Western literary canon, the neutrality of political and legal institutions, the goodness of imperialist powers. Certainly professors have the right to draw on these ideals. My point is that, far from being vanquished, these beliefs are the norm, the furniture in the room, virtually everywhere on campus.

University boards of directors are dominated by conservative interests. There are currently more corporate executives than academics and students on the boards of Ontario's 18 largest universities. The sociologists Claire Polster and Janice Newson write: "today's universities have become more commercial in orientation, more businesslike in practice and more corporate in self-preservation."

At this moment, Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government is tying post-secondary funding to new business-friendly performance measures. Against this backdrop, to declare that campus conservatism is flagging is either to be disingenuous or to miss the plot altogether.

During an open house on my campus two years ago, student activists posted signs in public spaces criticizing top university administrators' high salaries, and promoting a minimum wage hike. Campus officials tore down the signs, and disciplined and fined the students. In 2009, a pro-Palestinian poster was banned at Laurier, Carleton and Trent. So much for the conservative fantasy of campuses as progressive utopias.

If left-wing groups face this sort of crackdown, how can conservatives claim to be singled out for repression?

The myth of conservative persecution on campus is a reaction to even modest challenges to outright conservative supremacy. Students ask to be called by their preferred gender pronoun, and conservatives declare the death of the English language, if not the end of free speech. Students ask for greater diversity of voices in the syllabus, and conservatives rail against leftist tyranny, never acknowledging the persistence of traditional thought and codes of conduct all around them.

As a teacher, I expect there to be a range of perspectives in my classes. Most students, like most everyone, express mixtures of ideas. In every campus context, conservative views are major components of the mix.

Conservatives who claim they're routinely silenced really want to hear nothing but themselves. They're the biggest obstacle to cultivating the richest diversity of ideas on campus.

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