Illiberal Liberal Citadel to Close

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A cautionary tale on American liberalism run amuck-the death of Antioch College. Writes former public radio correspondent Michael Goldfarb:

Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination.

It's a telling account of what passes today for "progressive liberalism."

7 Comments for “Illiberal Liberal Citadel to Close”

  1. posted by arthur on

    And every building on campus had a leaky roof.

  2. posted by Doug on

    Antioch closed because it failed to deliver its product, an education. Certainly a Libertarian should be able to recognize that. Instead, Goldfarb, helped by Miller, seek to continue the program to attach a pejorative connotation to the word “liberal.” If you stick to the facts you might solve a problem but this “my ideology is better than your ideology” scuffling gets no one anywhere.

  3. posted by ETJB on

    This is not a cautionary tale of American liberalism. This is a cautionary tale of a dying institution.

  4. posted by North Dallas Thirty on

    Um….Doug, did you ever wonder WHY it was failing to deliver its product?

    I think this one provides a most revealing example.

    Much of this conformist thinking focused on gender politics, and it culminated in the notorious sexual offense prevention policy. Enacted in 1993, the policy dictated that a person needed express permission for each stage in seduction. (?May I touch your breast?? ?May I remove your bra?? And so on.) In two decades students went from being practitioners of free love to prisoners of gender.

    The actual policy language is even more entertaining.

    Really, I have to wonder how many person-hours were spent on coming up with that monstrosity, and at what rate; if that was on what they were focusing, no wonder they didn’t have time or money to fix the roofs.

  5. posted by North Dallas Thirty on

    And really, ironically, they got what they wanted; an institution that was hostile to men, white people, straight people, religion, and business.

    Then they acted surprised when no one supported them.

    One wonders if this will be in any way cautionary to those who persist in driving with a similar red light blinking on the dashboard.

  6. posted by Jorge on

    Yeech! That policy was a waste of brain cells. And the worst part is even with all that it has some pretty misogynist language in there. “The person(s) who are asked are responsible for verbally responding”??? Then I guess when they tried to cover their tracks they got a big mess out of it.

    I mean it gives progressive rape prevention a really bad name.

  7. posted by Brian Miller on

    Goldfarb, helped by Miller, seek to continue the program to attach a pejorative connotation to the word “liberal.”

    Actually, he’s simply pointing out how American “liberal” socialism, just like American “conservative” socialism, isn’t competitive, vital nor viable.

    In the free market, both “liberalism” and “conservatism” fail because they’re rigid, faith-based, and don’t demand results. Neither philosophy trusts the individual, both require central planners and rigid institutions with written “policies” to manage individual citizens (while punishing nonconformists), and neither accounts for the genuine diversity that’s a part of the human condition.

    Just as conservative institutions like Bob Jones University and Liberty University cannot offer a serious education because of the incurable deficiencies of conservatism, so liberal institutions like Antioch are similarly crippled by the incurably fatal flaws of the “liberal” philosophy.

    (Of course, by “liberal” I mean American left-socialist, not the original meaning of “liberal” as in “believing in individual liberty.” Classical liberals would grab the pitchforks and torches if they saw what was done to the label by the acolytes of fringe-left ideology!)

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