A recent blog entry-article came to my attention regarding the small issue of the University of Colorado endowing a chair on “Conservative Studies” (no joke!). This is surprising on many fronts, considering the overwhelming liberalism one is apt to encounter at most major universities and colleges, for those of the leftist ideological stripe in those lines of work usually consider conservatives as being either clinically insane or downright too mean-spirited to allow themselves to be as enlightened as the anointed in academia. Being academically-inclined myself, this is an issue that is near and dear to the heart of yours truly, as it is my goal to become an academic in the disciplines of business (one of the few areas of academia where one is apt to encounter a substantial amount of conservatives!).

What makes this development regarding the CS chair all the more surprising, though, is that it is to be endowed at the University of Colorado, one of the most insanely left-wing of already very liberal state universities. For example: at almost any major state college/university you visit or attend, there is plenty of liberalism to go around, albeit in varying degrees from school to school. You will find Purdue to be overall less liberal that, say, Indiana University, though the liberalism there is nothing compared to the leftism found at the University of Michigan, to say nothing of Wisconsin. Furthermore, even though the South is considered to be a very conservative region of the country, you’ll still encounter plenty of liberalism at the Universities of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. But at all of these places, both north and south – with a slight exception to IU – the overall community support for things like the schools’ football teams are staggering. Indeed, at the SEC schools and their home states, their schools’ gridiron squads represent a way of life. 

This is not the case at places such as Colorado U or Cal-Berkeley, where the communities are so left-wing that their ability to see the forest through the trees waved by-by to the hippies long ago. Thus, even though at places like Michigan, the liberal communities in Ann Arbor are gung-ho for the Wolverines, at Colorado U, the arch-liberal communities in Boulder end up being downright hostile toward the Buffaloes. Same thing goes for the whacko Berkeley communities and their hostility towards the Cal Golden Bears. The reason for such hostility can vary considerably, but it all boils down to either the logical extreme of associating the football teams with the military industrial complex – one of the favorite bogeymen of the left and even some on the extreme right – or that a manly sport like football represents the oppressive patriarchy of Western society – as if Eastern cultures and African tribal “societies “ are that much more feminized!

To sum things up, though, I find myself agreeing with the author’s piece regarding the endowment of the “Conservative Studies” chair at CU. Yes, the suffocating liberalism at CU and other colleges is an important issue because of the possibility of indoctrinating generations of youth into worshipping false gods, but this is not the way to address it. Rather, my solution would be an economic approach. Stop donating money to the schools, or at least to the liberal arts schools where much of this insane leftism originates. Business schools, engineering schools, medical schools and computer schools to the society in general and students in particular important services of providing training for marketable skills. As much as I love liberal arts studies, that which one is apt to learn there is not nearly as marketable as coming up with a formula for a plastic to be put into a car dashboard or loading critical software onto a business’ mainframe. Hence, donating money to such technical schools is worthy. Sending money to liberal arts schools, however, encourages leftism to continue to fester. If you want ideological reform and want school administrators to heed your [our] concerns, then derail the money train. There is no sound that will grab the ear of school administrators like the sound of closed wallets.