What To Expect

When I was doing online dating, which I don’t recommend at all, but with some regularity I would run across a woman who posted in her profile something like, “Any MAGA guys, move along.” Lots would post things like, “I am passionate about LGBTQ rights,” despite the fact that she was on a dating app as a heterosexual and LGBTQ rights have been secured. No corollary exists on the other side. I never saw “Biden voters take a hike”, or “Move along if you don’t like the second amendment.” What gives?

The data actually bears this out. When asked to provide a description of leftist positions, conservatives and non-leftists are able to consistently and fairly describe those beliefs, but when leftists are asked to describe beliefs by conservatives and non-leftists, they can’t do it in a way that is fair to those positions. They always slip into caricature, saying things like, “Conservatives lack empathy,” and “Conservatives just hate people.” If you can’t describe your opposition in terms they they will agree with, you don’t understand your opposition, and so, leftists don’t understand conservatives at all.

Now imagine that every single academic division at your university is staffed by professors who cannot understand conservatives at all. Lots and lots of cluster-b disorders. That’s the case. That’s exactly what we have, right now, and Trump is not going to be able to do anything about it. He can go after DEI programs, but leftists are only going to subvert that and dig in deeper as they respond to being on the defense.

Last week I ran across the story of James Bowley, a tenured religious studies professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. Millsaps is a tiny college affiliated with the Methodist Church. The day after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, Bowley emailed his students that he was canceling class to “mourn and process this racist fascist country.” At this point, I just roll my eyes. Bowley is a middle-aged guy with a Ph.D., and he absolutely believed when he sent that email to his students that he was safe, that he was preaching to the choir, but the President of the college got wind of the email and suspended him from campus, and then he went the extra mile and found a way to fire the tenured professor.

A few things:

1. If you can fire a tenured professor for speech, there’s no such thing as tenure.
2. Bowley was acting in an unprofessional manner. If he needed time to sit at home and weep over an election there was no need to inform his students about the reason.
3. Bowley had no doubt been indoctrinating his students into leftist schemes for many years.
4. Any field with the word “studies” attached to it is not a real field of study and serves no purpose in the academy except indoctrination.
5. Bowley would not afford any sort of freedom of speech principle to his imagined political enemies. He’d be holding the pitchfork.
6. LOL at needing to sit at home and mourn because you lost an election between two very wealthy crooks. Does he live in a cave? Was he born in this cave yesterday?

I wish I could muster a defense of Bowley’s freedom of speech, but in this case, I have a really hard time doing it. At most universities, this has worked the opposite way for many years. I can cite case after case of right-leaning professors losing their academic teaching positions because they exercised their freedom of speech, so it was leftists who created this precedent. Leftists have worked like busy little beavers over the past fifty years to drumming out conservatives, and creating the conditions in which no conservative would want to work, and further looking for red-flags on hiring committees to weed out the deplorables. Witness required diversity statements that many universities still require in their hiring packets, statements meant to weed out those with bad opinions, opinions that leftists do not even pretend to understand.

Guys like Bowley view themselves as evangelicals of a sort. They see their jobs as proselytizing to the unwashed students who show up in their classrooms, but in Mississippi, and in many many other places, too, those students have Christian backgrounds, and their parents are just working people who don’t have the time nor the inclination to take up pet social issues that have already been settled. They just want their kids to have it better than they had it, and a college education is still a ticket to a middle-class life in America, for better or for worse.

We used to have an archetype of the college professor who taught students how to think, not what to think. Professors who would take devil’s advocate positions just to make a student uncomfortable and force that student to expand this thinking, to be able to articulate their position and to understand the opposing position. Professors who asked questions and practiced the Socratic method. Those kinds of professors are an endangered species because leftists have worked for years and years to get them out, which leaves our university system as nothing more than an indoctrination mill.

University presidents ought to begin the process of weeding out the Bowleys from their institutions. Get them out! Will they? No. This Bowley case is a one-off.