Snowball survives hell

Stefan Beck finds himself agreeing with The Nation. The issue at hand? Conservative crybabies who demand the government ensure that universities employ dissenting voices.

Time was when conservatives complained about academia's liberal atmosphere — fog, let's call it — the way one does about persistent bad weather. The fog might darken one's mood, but even if it lasted for four years, it would give way one day to the daylight of thick-skinned adult discourse. The new crybabies disagree: Left-wing bias is nothing less than a bio-toxic cloud, poisoning virgin minds, requiring a sort of legal HAZMAT crew to disperse it. The clean-up, if they have their druthers, will not be the task of brave students or their outspoken professors, or pundits, for that matter. In Ohio, for starters, there's a piece of craven legislation, Senate Bill 24, being considered that demands that universities "provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints."

Dissent? Viewpoints? Words like these give us a whiff of our favorite trillion-dollar Superfund wasteland — the liberal academy's pious fuming.

Of course, it's a conservative's solemn charge to anticipate the worst, so we must assume that the fog is more chlorine gas than methane. The recent Ward Churchill flap demonstrated that this can be the case. Is that so terrible, though? An important and singularly unpleasant part of Basic Training in the U.S. Army is a stroll through the gas tent, in which soldiers must remove their masks for a taste of the worst. It's a matter of preparation. Conservatism's hyperbolic whiners ought to regard their college travails as a turn in an ideological gas tent, not a reason to petition the government for a hostage rescue.