Some thoughts on campus culture, which I think echo a number of things @yhazony have been arguing. Most campuses have an overwhelmingly left faculty and administration, but a somewhat more mixed student body. The more elite the institution, the more left-progressive the students.

Yet, arguably *especially* at elite schools, the reception and formation of their relatively small number of conservative students is very important, since they are likely to go on to have influential positions in various key institutions.

On a campus where conservative ideas and intellectual tradition is either ignored or maligned, conservative students will form their own groups and clubs, even “underworld.” And, lacking faculty direction and guidance, will often simply aim at upsetting the dominant liberal ethos

The result is a “bomb throwing” mentality, an untutored conservatism that is utterly unfamiliar with its own philosophical and cultural tradition. The kinds of things that draw students to aggressively confrontational politicized groups, and journals that aim to upset.

Whereas, if they find even a few supportive conservative faculty, they stand a chance to learn more about the ideas and philosophies that undergird their political instincts. Those instincts can be refined and elevated, rather than driven underground where they fester and deform.

Progressives implicitly act as if, once they eliminate those voices from campus life, those beliefs will cease to exist. Instead, they are fostering conditions for bad actors and ever more extremism, on both sides.

Unless universities - especially the most elite - make it part of their ethos to include conservative voices and philosophies *that are deeply a part of the western intellectual tradition,* but which don’t form a part of current pieties, our political situation will only worsen.

The effort to patrol speech and thought through “wokeness” isn’t just shutting down ideas - which is itself a problem on campuses - but a genuine threat to the prospects for political moderation for the nation as a whole. The result is an ever more radicalized politics.