To the Editors:
The academic fascism that emanates from colleges and universities throughout the U.S. today without a doubt had its unhappy origin in the radicalization of campuses during the late 1960s when I was a student at Bowdoin.
I well remember the near takeover of the campus by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other like groups claiming to be pursuing economic and social justice when in fact they were merely attempting to impose a totalitarian leftist ideology on the campus, thereby politicizing one of the finest colleges in America.
Conservative students suddenly found themselves de facto stripped of free speech rights and unwholesomely afraid of articulating more traditional (ie. Judeo-Christian) views of the nature of man, politics and social structures.
Political correctness—which now imposes absolute standards of censorship on both students and faculty—had its dangerous inception during this tumultuous and anarchic time and has now come to fruition in the absurd, incoherent, and unjust leftist domination of the typical college campus.
If you're going to speak on almost any college campus these days, you had better fit the institution's Orwellian template for correct thinking or you will be censored...or even worse.
In the future, one hopes that institutions of higher education in our nation will return to their true mission in the culture—cultivating scholarship and pursuing truth in all its varied disciplines—and not merely imposing upon the academic community a universal standard, which stifles divergent views and their expression on campus.
Sincerely,
Peter Wilson '70