In a recent O’Reilly “Mad as Hell” segment, a student-viewer expressed his anger at being unable to voice his conservative views in the college classroom without fear of reprisal from his liberal professors.
Think about that for a moment. We send our youth to college so that they can lead more productive and lucrative lives, to become contributing citizens who help weave more strength into the fabric of this nation. In that context, every stout thread has value, whether it warps left or right.
And the key word in that sentence is “value,” and even more particularly, “future value.”
Now consider that in many personal injury lawsuits, a key factor in establishing damages against a defendant is the degree to which his actions have limited the future earnings of the plaintiff. By that measure, very large amounts can be calculated that juries must weigh in the process of redressing the wrong. This is one reason why so many medical malpractice judgments and awards are so large.
Now gather those two truths into one line of thinking: those pursuing college degrees are doing so in order to better their life experience, and the best way to do that is to increase one’s earning ability. And since one’s college transcript can be a decisive determinant in the hiring process, those who control what ends up in that transcript have a definite influence and impact on any student’s career path and earning capacity.
Test case: a former paratrooper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is pursuing a degree in an American university, and he finds that his world and political views, formed on the basis of his extensive on-the-ground, life-and-death experiences and participation in key world events, are considered unacceptable and unworthy to the gray-ponytailed remnants of Woodstock who reign in the classrooms, the limp, life-impotent wimps totally lacking in similar real-life experiences, who conduct his courses. And because those old failed and fading hippies find his views offensive to their own hard-left positions, his classwork is shaded in the shadow of their political bias. An otherwise perfectly well-reasoned paper is D-graded or even failed because the premise offends the political sensibilities of the ponytailed Bolsheviks.
At the end of four years, what is the effect of those politically determined grades on the overall numeric accounting of that soldier’s scholastic performance? If the effect is to drop the grade point average from A to B — or worse, A to C or even D — how does that appear to those who will then be using that grade from that transcript to form their initial opinions in granting that applicant an interview?
Have those liberal professors not had a direct negative impact on that young veteran’s ability to be hired? Have they not had a direct negative impact on his ability to maximize his earning ability? Of course they have.
So I suggest that people in the soldier’s position sue the offending school for the loss of future earnings. If multiple suits of this nature are filed, it will take only one courtroom success to set all the loss-prevention specialists at universities all over the country to pondering their future financial threat. From that point I cannot predict, but knowing the reflexively defensive nature of these institutions to anything that threatens their financial bases, some changes will surely be made.
Will such changes end the problem? Nope, not entirely, but they will unquestionably ensconce a watchful, wary administrative eye over the classroom conduct and the course grading of that gray-ponytailed communist cohort who presently contaminates the campus. When such lefties become a legal liability to their employing institutions, their own future employment and earning capabilities become problematic.
Will some stout Iraq-Afghanistan veteran out there going to college on G.I. benefits and facing this kind of leftist oppression please file the first precedent-setting suit? Or better yet, a graduate who was low-graded by his leftist professors and who has found that the low grading has had impact on his hirability? One win is all it will take to begin the change to this perversity that now pollutes honest educating all across this country.
Veteran, G.I. Bill status will lend great weight to the truth of a plaintiff’s claim to exposing ongoing injustice in the educational environment. I know, I know — as an old soldier myself, never, never volunteer, but some courageous warrior needs to stand tall for himself and his vast Band of Brothers whose post-combat careers should not be limited and diminished by these hellish covens of tenure-protected pinko professors.
Dare I suggest they be strung up by their ponytails?
Crossposted at American Thinker
