islamo-facism awareness week
Apparently, this was a Big Deal at some universities last week. And by Big Deal, I mean the Left was protesting and suppressing speech. In a very logical article, Dennis Prager described his experience at UCSB after having been compared to a Klan member in a student newspaper column for giving a talk on Islamo-fascism
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Yes, he's making generalizations. There's nothing wrong with generalizations as long as they are understood as such. Since he's speaking about American universities on the whole, I thought that was implicit. Also, I see no problem with words such as "many" or "rarely". Obviously, there'd be a problem with a statement like "Universities never invite conservatives to speak." As written, he's making a statement that liberal speakers are invited far more often than conservative speakers, a phenomenon I witnessed again and again at Marquette. Was it really your experience that at Madison conservative speakers were invited as often as liberal ones?
As I described in comments to machiavelli_f, I had professors (mainly of philosophy) who were not shy about pushing their liberal ideas on the class. One of my professors subtly tried to convince us that the creation of Israel was an aggression that justified the Palestinian response and that the US could be classified as a state sponsor of terror. When we studied capital punishment or abortion in another philosophy class, both views were presented, but the liberal views of life for the criminal but death for the fetus were clearly presented as the "right" views.
It may have been your experience that both ends of the political spectrum were fairly represented at Madison. That's great. I have several other friends at Madison or alumni of Madison who have expressed views that align very well with the author of this article. And again, he's generalizing about universities as whole.
As far as the adjectives used to describe conservatives, perhaps these are not employed by the professors in academic settings, but they are often used in casual discourse just as there are laundry lists of poor adjectives used to describe liberals.
You're right, my discussions on LJ have taught me that people who hold liberal positions are often motivated by the best of intentions and often have well-reasoned and principled positions for their views. I don't think the author is arguing that's not the case. He's arguing that conservatives do as well and that is often not presented in the university setting. I'm glad that was not the case in your college experience. Sadly, it was the case in mine.
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