You won't find the answer in this slightly crackpot article by someone named Edward Feser who is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, with a 1999 Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
This fellow has a Ph.D. from a good department, and already has a foothold in academia. Why is he committing professional suicide by publishing lunatic rantings like this? He claims, bizarrely, that the curriculum at all universities is "suffused with themes such as":
"capitalism is inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and impoverishing;
"socialism, whatever its practical failures, is motivated by the highest ideals and that its luminaries -- especially Marx -- have much to teach us; globalization hurts the poor of the Third World;
"natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and that human industrial activity is an ever-increasing threat to "the environment";
"most if not all psychological and behavioral differences between men and women are 'socially constructed' and that male-female differences in income, representation in various professions, and the like are mostly the result of 'sexism';
"the pathologies of the underclass in the United States are due to racism and that the pathologies of the Third World are due to the lingering effects of colonialism;
"Western civilization is uniquely oppressive, especially to women and 'people of color,' and that its products are spiritually inferior to those of non-Western cultures;
"traditional religious belief, especially of the Christian sort, rests on ignorance of modern scientific advances, cannot today be rationally justified, and persists on nothing more than wishful thinking;
"traditional moral scruples, especially regarding sex, also rest on superstition and ignorance and have no rational justification; and so on and on."
I very much doubt any of this is even true of the curriculum at Professor Feser's institution, Loyola Marymount; it certainly bears no relationship to the curriculum at, e.g., UC Santa Barbara or the University of Texas at Austin. (Among other ironies, UCSB and Texas are the leading centers of research in to evolutionary psychology, which vigorously denies the "social construction" of gender differences thesis!)
What inspires such paranoid fantasies that have no basis in fact? Why is a trained philosopher spreading lies to the general public, who will now be led to believe, contrary to all evidence, that there are not competing research programs in sociology, in psychology, in economics, in philosophy on all these questions?
Since I subscribe to versions of two or three of the propositions noted above, may I be permitted to observe that I would be very happy, indeed, if I had more than a handful of colleagues who believed the same! But the real world is not Professor Feser's fantasy world.
There is a serious psychological question here: what prompts certain people who presumably know something about universities to broadcast disinformation like this? If anyone has insight in to Professor Feser, I'd be curious. Displays like this, especially coming from philosophers, are embarrassing.
UPDATE: More critique of the lunatic rant from a biologist here.
FURTHER UPDATE: I should clarify a point from the original posting. The reason I think Professor Feser's crackpot rant will damage his professional opportunities has nothing to do with his apparently being on the far right (though no one would have known this but for this depressing display). It has to do with the fact that he has so wildly misrepresented what is going on in universities and scholarly disciplines. On the most charitable reading, hiring departments will conclude that Professor Feser is embarrassingly ignorant of what is going on in cognate (and not-so-cognate) fields; ignorance of such proportions is ordinarily disqualifying. On a less charitable, but more natural reading, he is so irrationally obsessed, or simply disturbed, that he has lost his grip on reality. Irrationality or apparent mental disturbance in a candidate is also generally disqualifying. (One could imagine the same scenario, in reverse, with, say, a Stalinist denouncing "bourgeois physics" and so on.) (I admit there's a third scenario here, aptly put by Harry Brighouse [Wisconsin Philosophy]: "Feser is not commiting professional suicide....He has obviously decided that a career as a professional polemicist might make him more money and notoriety than a career as a professor. (There is A LOT of right wing money around for people like this). Unless he is an outstanding academic he is almost certainly right — he’s obviously good at getting lots of attention with this loose, ill-informed stuff, so unless, again, he’s really an outstanding academic, he’s making a rational move." Could be.)
FINAL UPDATE: Professor Feser is understandably upset that I've called the attention of the profession to his display, and so, in reply, he has now misrepresented what he said before. He says "Brian Leiter...disagrees with my assertion that conservatives are treated with condescension and hostility in the modern university." But that was not Professor Feser's assertion; his assertion concerned the themes suffusing university curriculums, as noted above. He says Leiter's "way of proving me wrong is to call me 'embittered' and a 'crackpot,' a 'lunatic' whose 'ranting' and 'paranoid' 'lies' are not only 'embarrassing,' but raise 'a serious psychological question' about my mental stability." In fact, of course, that was not how I "proved" anything: I pointed out, rather, that Feser's claims about university curriculums were false, indeed, so false and misleading as to raise questions about either his honesty or his sanity. Of course, the Brighouse hypothesis, above, may be the correct one.
Professor Feser's public humiliation has, at least, had the salutary effect of calming his rhetoric and toning down his hyperbole. Chris Bertram (Bristol Philosophy) has responded to the toned down version of Feser's claims here.
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