Bright College Days?

I have been following, with some trepidation, the newest Far Right assault on Life, the Universe, and Everything . . . also known as the college educational experience.

(And behavior like the Colorado professor who asserts that the victims of the Twin Towers assaults on Sept. 11 deserved it don't help. >>sigh<< As the late, great Jeff MacNelly once noted in "Shoe," "If you're going to have freedom of speech, you have to put up with a lot of dumbness of speech.")

It seems that college is nothing more than an indoctrination into left wing politics. And students who disagree live in constant fear that if their opinions become known, they will be failed by their Machievellian/Marxist professors, and thus not get their coveted sheepskins.

Furthermore, it seems that colleges and universities are havens for the left wing because they are the only places where it is acceptible to be left wing. Birds of a feather flocking together, I guess.

My somewhat peckish thoughts:

(1) If college is so dangerous intellectually, why is a college degree still so highly valued?

(2) Is it just possible that left wing views tend to prevail in colleges and universities (IF they do--I am not about to concede that point without a lot more evidence than some Neocon's assertions) because (>>gasp!<<) education opens one's mind?

(3) Since the prevailing attitude in child-rearing in this country currently seems to be to teach children WHAT to think, and not HOW to think, what in the world makes anyone think that 18 years of indoctrination at home can be erased by a mere 8 semesters of exposure to different ideas?

Unless, of course, those 8 semesters of exposure to different ideas show the utter bankruptcy of the ideas one entertained in the 18 years coming in?

I guess it's really not unlike the Neocons' collective attitude toward government: they say "Big Government" is bad, but what they mean is that "Big Government" is bad only when its aims, goals, and programs disagree with their preferred aims, goals, and programs.

Look at Dubya's just-submitted budget if you doubt it. Isn't the Republican Party the supposed bastion of fiscal responsibility? And yet we are running record deficits under Dubya. The defecits would be even worse than they appear if certain aspects of the budget, like Iraq and Afghanistan military spending, would be put in with the main budget instead of continuously being hidden in supplemental budget requests . . . which are supposed to be used for unforeseen emergency spending needs, like the recent tsunami disaster, not for foreseeable expenses like ongoing military expenditures.

I am beginning to think I can understand how Lord Cornwallis felt at Yorktown when the band struck up "The World Turned Upside Down."