From a National Review Online article, The Princeton Way by Stanley Kurtz:
April 11, 2005, 8:31 a.m. [/] The Princeton Way [/] There's a real demand out there for alternative programs and points of view on college campuses. [by Stanley Kurtz]And a reversal of the dietary restriction trend would also help. See an In Two Cities post, The Important Scandal at Harvard .If Steven Roy Goodman is right, the implications for the academy are immense. According to Goodman, who makes his living advising students who are applying to college, many families are now so fed up with campus p.c. that they've started to avoid the most egregiously left-wing schools. That means students are beginning to shun big-name colleges - where politicization is at its worst - in favor of less prestigious, but also less prejudiced, schools. For example, Columbia University seems to be losing applicants in the wake of student charges of political intimidation by Middle East-studies faculty.
Stories of campus political correctness first flared in the mid-1980s. Then, sometime in the '90s, people stopped paying attention. Everyone knew that campuses were bastions of political correctness, but the public wrote off the leftist professorate as a bunch of hopeless, irrelevant cranks. Lately, though, things have changed. As the Left's monopoly on campus has become nearly total, the abuses have grown (think Lawrence Summers and Ward Churchill). At the same time, 9/11, generational change, and the rise of alternative media have produced a more conservative cohort of students. And now a series of empirical studies have provided evidence to back up the widely shared sense that the professorate - particularly at the elite schools - has been monopolized by the Left. (See here and here.) The rebellion against campus p.c. may finally be nearing critical mass. Once prestigious schools actually stand to lose applicants, administrators may finally wake up and do something to balance their one-sided faculties. [ … ]
In fact, Princeton's Madison Program is a model for solving the political-correctness problem in the academy as a whole. We may not be able to do much about tenured humanities and social-science faculties at elite colleges that are liberal by margins of more than 90 percent. But setting up small enclaves of professors with more conservative views is a real possibility. It's amazing how much the presence of even a relatively small alternative program can do to generate debate - and diffuse intimidation. [ … ]
