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For one thing, students are smarter than we give them credit for.
The year 2017 might be remembered as the time when higher education’s political-correctness problem moved from the conservative echo chamber into the mainstream zeitgeist, with the likes of The Atlantic and The New York Times weighing in on hostile, even violent, student outcries against conservative speakers at Middlebury College, the University of California at Berkeley, and points in between.
Our profession’s own American Political Science Association, which can be fairly characterized as a center-left body, condemned the violence at Middlebury, issuing a ringing endorsement of free speech (though, as typifies our field, there were dissenting views).
As these recent campus incidents attest, higher education has an intellectual-diversity problem. In many fields — sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, among others — nonleftist faculty are becoming extinct. Making matters worse, America’s most elite institutions tend to be the most ideologically homogenous, producing an isolated elite which in turn contributes to a disgruntled citizenry. As the social distance between the elites and the rest grows, citizens continue to lose trust in the government, the media, and especially higher education. A recent Pew survey reflects that disenchantment, especially on the right, finding that 58 percent of Republicans say that colleges and universities have a negative impact on the country, up from 37 percent just two years earlier.
But while these are reasons for grave concern, the conservative fixation on political correctness is, in fact,...