ABSTRACT
For more than 40 years, and particularly since the 1980s, critics located in right-leaning think tanks, foundations, and the media—as well as those inside academia—have championed the cause of conservative undergraduates who, they say, suffer on college campuses. In books with such titles as The Shadow University (Kors and Silverglate 1998) and Indoctrination U (Horowitz 2007), conservatives decry American universities as bastions of anti-religious, liberal thought where professors foist propaganda onto students (Bloom 1988; D’Souza 1992; Horowitz 2006). On the social front, detractors criticize mandatory freshmen orientations, left-leaning university-funded speakers’ series, and libertine campus organizations that they claim encourage students to embrace a sexually decadent, socially relativistic zeitgeist. On the academic front, they accuse radical-liberal faculty of politicizing the classroom with feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies when they should be exposing students to a canonical education in Western Culture. These critics argue that a hostile political atmosphere exists on campus, which militates against diversity of opinion and creates a chilling effect on speech and expression.
