Despite denials from the left, US higher education has been captured by leftist faculty, students, and administrators. This is not a figment of anyone’s imagination, as for most of this century colleges and universities have changed dramatically.

Anyone who has been to college in the past half-century would attest to what then was called the “liberalism” of most of their professors, and, in the post-World War II era, the probability that one’s professor was a registered Democrat has been high. Yet, this is not what we mean by the “radicalizing” of American higher education, for even those professors that classified themselves as “liberals” and faithfully supported the Democratic Party would not have considered themselves to be radicals.

However, there also were demands for academic integrity 50 years ago, and certainly most of my professors at the University of Tennessee (1971-75) would have given at least a good effort to place their academic role above politics. In fact, I cannot recall being subjected to any politicized curricula—and I was a journalism major during the Watergate crisis, which practically invited politics into the classroom.

This does not mean that professors didn’t have political opinions or that the university itself was free of politics. I’m sure that most of my professors were Democrats but I don’t remember any of them attempting to influence my own political views (which, at best, were a mishmash of a lot of nonsense). There were, however, the effects of the cultural revolution that had begun before I went to college were already taking hold on the language, such as calling freshmen “freshpersons” and chairman a “chairperson.” For most of us, these things were eye-rolling but not really harmful. Furthermore, if some of us insisted on using the term “freshman,” there was no attempt to impose a campus-wide shaming campaign.

Today, the situation is very different. Higher education has been thoroughly politicized to a point where even if things were to turn around today, it would take an entire generation before things could be where they were even 30 years ago. There are no academic areas left in higher education that have not been corrupted by leftist thought. …

Why didn’t the scholars just say no? Some of them did, and found themselves on the receiving end of social justice mobbing via social media. During the Duke Lacrosse madness, Duke faculty that did speak out against the rush to judgment became targets of vengeful activist faculty members, who attempted to intimidate anyone who might disagree with them.

In the world of scholars and schemers, it is hard for the former to fight back against the latter. First, and most important, these two groups have very different viewpoints of their jobs as faculty members. Scholars believe their job is to introduce students to bodies of knowledge and to pursue research that reflects their areas of expertise.

Schemers, on the other hand, see their job as turning students into social justice activists by propagandizing them. Anyone who might object is immediately labeled a racist or worse, and there is always an army of angry social media ready to pounce on the dissenter. The social justice warriors, after all, are saving the world by fighting racism and opposing capitalism. Anyone who opposes them by definition has bad motives.

In the end, the scholars continue their work, albeit by keeping their heads down and trying not to be noticed. Gramsci’s conquest of higher education is nearly complete and soon enough, scholars will be a tiny minority in American colleges and universities and in time will likely disappear altogether.