Black is White

George Will is joining the chorus of attack on the universities:

Academics, such as the next secretary of state, still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations — except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome. They do indeed cultivate diversity — in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought. So here's what things look like once you've fallen through the looking glass:  a representative of the monochrome mass media--where diversity means a political spectrum so narrow that no social democrat, socialist, or genuine libertarian finds a regular home--has the audacity to suggest that the only institution where genuine intellectual diversity in the United States still exists (where it is possible to teach, as I do [and my situation is not atypical], with Burkean conservatives, free market utopians, socialists, social democrats, Clintonite democrats, and regular 'ole boring liberals) lacks diversity of "thought"!  Perhaps never having had one, he doesn't recognize where it still exists. But let us translate:  what Mr. Will really means is that universities are places where the banalities and misinformation which are the lifeblood of the mass media are not taken seriously; where people who think Iraq attacked the World Trade Center have a tough time holding their own in grown-up conversation; where apologists for state terror have to confront the arguments of those who know an apology for state terror when they see it; where lies about economic and social policy are perceived as lies, and made to answer to facts and evidence; where, in short, the parochial smugness of an effete little simpleton like George Will (and his many clones who constitute the "diversity" of the mass media) is perceived as exactly that.