The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Opinion
Today’s Editors’ Choice
- Walter Williams: Metastasizing Academic Cancer
- Ben Shapiro: The Insanity of the Left’s Child Gender-Confusion Agenda
- Gary Bauer: The Syria Debate
To view all of today’s opinion, click here.
Opinion in Brief
Walter Williams: “The average American has little knowledge of the extent to which our institutions of higher learning have been infected with a spreading cancer. One aspect of that cancer is akin to the loyalty oaths of the 1940s and ‘50s. Professors were often required to sign statements that affirmed their loyalty to the United States government plus swear they were not members of any organizations, including the Communist Party USA, that sought the overthrow of the United States government. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down loyalty oaths as a condition of employment in 1964. Today we’re seeing the re-emergence of the mentality that gave us loyalty oaths, in the form of mandating that faculty members write 'diversity statements,’ especially as part of hiring and promotion procedures. … The fascist college trend that we are witnessing today is by no means new. As early as 1991, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: ‘The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.’ What diversity oaths seek is to maintain political conformity among the faculty indoctrinating our impressionable, intellectually immature young people. Vladimir Lenin said, ‘Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.’ That’s the goal of the leftist teaching agenda.”