Before I matriculated at college, I was out at a bar with my sister's friends from medical school, one of whom had brought a date. I don't remember much about this woman except that she seemed very interested in the post-adolescent limbo I was in, having just graduated from high school and occupying the threshold of a supposedly "formative" experience in life. Which cask would I be maturing in? Brideshead Revisited or Animal House? Or someplace in between? One of the worries I brought up to her was that I didn't much see myself as a frat guy, yet I was going to a school where Saturday nights (not to mention Monday through Friday nights) were measured in kegs of cheap beer and gallons of more costly vomit. How was I going to avoid this scene? "Oh well, if you're against all that, that's good," she said. "It'll be four years of learning how to deal with people and conditions you'll be dealing with your whole life." Fucking twit, I thought as I smiled and mumbled false appreciation for this unglimpsed "bright side."

She was right, I was arrogant and wrong. College is about opposition, as much the conditional kind as the intellectual. Kingsley Amis stated the case best in that best of all academic satires, Lucky Jim:

"The one indispensible answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad. The reason why Prometheus couldn't get away from his vulture was that he was keen on it, not the other way around."

Which is why so many of the "anti-PC" crusades in academia amount to a willful blunting of the tools that would normally grow sharper under the grating absurdities of modern life. Tendency, authority and faction have got to be confronted sooner or later. Who thinks anything is going to be learned in a classroom where "every view is equally respected," political biases are kept hidden, and any idiotic piffle is recorded as "an interesting point, but..."? The walking 4.0 index, against whom there is no departmental complaint, and whose diploma amounts to a certificate of correct thinking -- how prepared is he or she for the ego tilt-a-whirl of the office, the Stalinoid purge of the PTA, the muted condescension of the co-op board? What will get lost in the translation from in loco parentis to in the real world, assuming the university does not remain the breeding ground for bullshit that it currently is and always has been?

The antipodal takes on the college campus -- whether it's the ivy-covered clerestory of noble pursuits or the scheming quandrangle of professional courtesy -- both assume a zone removed entirely from everyday social reality. In fact, the campus is everyday social reality, concentrated and made even less escapable or bearable. This is my only problem with David Horowitz's academic "Bill of Rights": it's trying to return the university to some never-existent Aracdia of cool tenured temperaments and symposia of "non-judgment." Better luck turning tin into gold. Listen to this from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Back in the 1950s, even though he was a Marxist, [Horowitz's] professors at Columbia University never treated him poorly because of his politics. He would have told the senators that in all his years in school -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- he never heard a teacher or professor express a political prejudice in class. Things are different now, he would have said.

Yes, things are different now. Horowitz is no longer a Marxist and subjective statements from the pedagogues no longer appear to him as objective truths. Lionel Trilling was at Columbia in the 1950's. If Horowitz took a course taught by that great Marxist critic and neglected to register a single "political prejudice" emanating from the lectern, it's obvious he didn't attend class very much.

The real issue is how ideology affects grading. Horowitz's advocacy group, Students for Academic Freedom, maintains that conservatives fare poorly at the end of the semester as against their liberal counterparts. I'm not sure whether this is true, although I've heard it corroborated by reasonable anecdotal evidence (which, when you consider that the more respected "statistics" are being generated by the universities themselves, is really the only type of evidence to be trusted.) But isn't it another frequent gripe of conservatives that grade inflation has destroyed the scholarly meritocracy and made it that much harder for the best students -- i.e. the conservative ones -- to distinguish themselves as competitors for jobs, scholarships and graduate admissions? It's never said that grade inflation benefits only the liberals: how easy would this be to fix if everyone could just sound like Barbra Streisand and make it into Phi Beta Kappa? So if entitlements now come standard, how is it that young Buckleyites fail to cash in their welfare checks the same as everyone else?

Another contradiction lies in a popular conservative definition -- first offered, I think, by P.J. O'Rourke in his American Spectator phase -- of political correctness. "Good manners legislated." Well, what's an academic Bill of Rights if not counteractive legislation? Isn't trying to officialize the clamor about "bias" just PC risen to the dialectical give-and-take? Unless the whole country is now dominated by elite lefties (and if this is so then clamor is all the righties can do, since Canada is presumably hostile emigre territory after the last election) won't good argument and the neutral deliberation of history vindicate the "controversial" thesis of, say, the flat tax, or the neglected humanism of the Spanish Inquisition? It's got to be less savory a win, more damaging to the fighting Socratic spirit, if a culture of perfect fair-mindedness becomes one's only forensic obstacle.