The University System Is the Progressives ’ Seminary
By Hezekiah Kantor
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 1 nationally by a ratio of only six to one .
According to the 2016 Voter Study Group , approximately 52 percent of Americans are conservatives . Forty-eight percent are liberals . That ’ s what America thinks like . 2 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 .
In 2018 , the National Association of Scholars published a study by Mitchell Langbert , an assistant professor at Brooklyn College . The study looked at the political affiliations at fifty-one of the sixty-six highest-ranked liberal arts colleges and 8,688 of the professors they employ . His study found that , in aggregate , Democrats outnumber Republicans by a
34 THE RENEWANATION REVIEW