The insightful article by Walter Williams today pinpoints how cultural Marxists have essentially destroyed academic freedom at most American universities while pursuing an agenda of the infantilization of college students.  In the old days the Marxists rarely, if ever, debated their intellectual opponents.  Instead, they simply resorted to name calling and personal attacks (“Capitalist Tool!!”).  After the worldwide collapse of socialism the academic Marxists gave up on the capitalist-working class exploitation story and reinvented themselves by inventing a new class of alleged exploiters: white heterosexual males.  All other groups are, by definition, “oppressed” by what they call “white male privilege.”  The poorest, least educated white redneck living in an old bus down by the river in Mississippi is said to be, by definition, an “oppressor” of Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, all women, gays, lesbians, the transgendered, and all the other mascot groups of the academic left.

Like the old Marxists, the cultural Marxists do not debate their intellectual opponents; they simply call them vile names.  As the Walter Williams article pointed out, a potential donor to Bowdoin College was publicly labeled a “racist” by the college president because he suggested that Bowdoin should teach courses about American history and cool it with the obsession with “diversity” (a.k.a. institutionalized discrimination against white heterosexual males) as the sole purpose of higher education.  This is why we observe such spectacles as when Walter Block gave a state-of-the-art public lecture at Loyola University Maryland on the economics of discrimination, a field pioneered by Professor Block’s Columbia University dissertation advisor, the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, he was libeled by the university president, Brian Linnane, as a racist and a sexist.  (Linnane wasn’t even at the lecture; it was enough for him to hear that someone had criticized one of the superstitions of academic feminism, that sex discrimination is the one-and-only-cause of male/female wage differences).  There are dozens — probably hundreds — of other similar examples in academe, which is why it has indeed become an academic cesspool, as Walter Williams describes.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo