The University System Is the Progressives’ Seminary

One hallmark of religions is they often have an institution of higher learning, where the most ambitious and well schooled young people go to complete their religious training and enter the world as leaders of their faith.  In Christianity, we call these seminaries.  A seminary is the place where a devout believer goes before he enters ministry.  Once this training is completed, he is called to go out into the world to minister to his flock and to convert the unconverted.

The Progressive Left has a seminary, too — a finishing school where the ambitious and well schooled are polished to become “ministers” of their religion.  It is the American university system.

The average high school graduate of promise often has no idea what world he is entering.  All he knows is that all of his teachers have encouraged him from kindergarten until the end of his senior year that, if he has the talent and ability, he must go to college.  The reasons for this aren’t nefarious.  He will make more money as a college graduate; he will have a lower unemployment rate as a college graduate; and his general prospects for marriage, mental health, and the chance to retire are greatly improved by college.  College has been, and continues to be, a great benefit — just like the public primary and secondary schools — for these reasons.  But he is also unaware that he is about to enter a world that is even more slanted against tradition and conservatism than his usually left-leaning public school teachers, where conservatives are outnumbered nationally by a ratio of only 6 to 1.

According to the 2016 Voter Study Group, approximately 52% of Americans are conservatives.  Forty-eight percent are liberals.  That’s what America thinks like.  Our young high school pupil grows up being raised by these people, going to church with these people, playing sports with these people, and being in community with these people — the truly diverse America.

Then he goes to college, and he enters an entirely different world.  The ideology is no longer split almost fifty-fifty, as it is in the real America.  Instead, he enters the seminary, a place populated by a sort of priesthood (the professors), whose members teach the religion of Progressive Liberalism — through the content of the courses, through the arguments of the lectures they give, and through the host of campus-sponsored events the university puts on.  Looking at the politics of the university professoriate, it’s hard not to make the connection.

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