[The following was adapted from FREEDOM OR SOCIALISM? The Millennial Dilemma.]
Following the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik I in 1957, the general orientation of American education shunned Progressive life-adjustment pedagogy and re-embraced traditional academic studies in the liberal arts, mathematics, and the hard sciences. With the communist threat looming ever larger, the neo-traditionalists believed the future of American democracy depended on a return to “traditional” academic studies. This set the theme for the elementary and high school education of the Boomer generation. Unfortunately “traditional” academics began to eliminate the “spiritual’ component of education. The Supreme Court issued two bans on prayer in public schools. The first ban came in 1962 and the second was issued in 1963. [We were fighting the Soviet system by copying its doctrine.]
In the late 60s, the pendulum would swing to the liberal side as the traditionally educated Boomer Left rebelled against authority, protested against the Vietnam War, experimented with drugs and free love, graduated from college after 7 or 8 years, then moved into academia on a permanent basis as the new liberal left faculty. Today leftist liberals dominate the academic faculties and are in the process of destroying the very fabric of the Nation using the funding provided by disconnected alumnae and massive endowments with no strings attached. In addition, taxpayers are unwittingly funding the subversion by contributing to a public and private school funding scheme that supports student loans which only causes the universities to increase tuition without improving the quality of the education provided. Much like Medicare, the money flows to more overly-paid administrators, useless campus expansions, and leftist faculty control of tenure. Conservative educators, those who primarily wanted to teach the Truth, are muzzled and disenfranchised. Many of these were and still are, the best educators, but they are aging-out of the profession.
Today, the liberal arts are far-leftist arts. The professors are teaching the poison of Marxism without revealing its aftermath and failures. It is time to de-fund that abomination.
I've spent many years in left-controlled liberal universities. Often being the lone conservative professor, I was tempted to apply for "combat pay" as compensation for the daily struggle to teach fairly and honestly.
My wife and I can echo Harry's comment; the radical leftists and anti-everything protestors of the 1960s are today's aging administrators. They educated the Gen-Xers and Millenials to not love God, Country and Truth, but taught Humanism, Globalism and Post-Modernism and it's wishy-washy relative "truths." A student argued with me last week that America is the biggest cause of Global-Climate-Warming-Change and thank goodness (fake) president Biden got us back into the Paris Climate Accords. . .won't be easy changing the hearts and minds of today's college students.