When college tour guides take parents with inquiring minds on escorted visits to the campus, the talking points their universities supplied them with tend to crumble. “I noticed on the tours with our twin boys going to college that we were told by the tour guides, ‘Professors here do not tell us what to think: They teach us how to think,” writer Caitlin Flanagan recalled at a conference last week. “That’s a lie,” she said.
Flanagan spoke at a conference sponsored by the conservative Network of enlightened Women (NeW). It should be noted that Flanagan, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, does not, to say the least, tilt noticeably to the right.
Yet and still, the author of two books—The Hell With All That and Girl Land—is acutely observant. “You always know when someone is winning when they fight free speech,” she told the audience of mostly college-age women.
In the ongoing ideological struggle between the political left and right, “In the culture at large it goes up and down,” she observes. “On campus over the last 50 years—game over: The Left’s won.”
“When somebody wins, they want to shut down the other side. That is why President Trumps attacks the press. That’s why President Obama tried to subpoena reporters.”
The iron fist approach of university administrators to political debates is particularly unnerving given the purpose of higher education, Flanagan argues. “College has two functions,” she pointed out at the NeW conference. “Education and furthering the pursuit of knowledge.”
