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Yes, Steve, we have lost the ability to debate issues on campuses

What happened at WLU is the product of five decades of tenured radicals executing their Gramscian “long march” through the academy. In 1969, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education found there were about twice as many left-of-centre faculty as right-of-centre. Today, in the humanities, according to an Econ Journal Watch study, it is about 12 to 1. In some departments, like English, the faculty is virtually 100 per cent leftist.

Why is that fact so dangerous to academic health? Because, as John M. Ellis, emeritus professor at the University of California Santa Cruz and chairman of the California Association of Scholars, observes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Higher Education’s Deeper Sickness,” “[I]ntellectual dominance promotes stupidity. As one side becomes numerically stronger, its discipline weakens. The greater the imbalance between the two sides, the more incoherent and irrational the majority will become…. With almost no intellectual opponents remaining, campus radicals have lost the ability to engage with arguments and resort instead to the lazy alternative of name-calling: opponents are all ‘fascists,’ ‘racists’ or ‘white supremacists’.”

That is precisely the WLU case. Indeed the actual words “Hitler,” “racism” and “white supremacist” were adduced by Shepherd’s accusers to indicate the seriousness of her alleged transgression (also to intimidate and shame her; they managed to reduce her to tears). We’re fortunate to know this only because Shepherd had the presence of mind to record the hearing, without which the story might have fizzled. Listening to it, one becomes shockingly aware that one is witnessing an intellectual assault, committed by power-holding ideologues, on an innocent victim, whose “crime” was to expose students to two sides of a cultural debate. (One of the WLU disciplinarians, professor Nathan Rambukkana, did issue Shepherd a public apology on Monday).