Senior year of college, I took a political economy class from a very left-wing, but very fair-minded, Sociology professor. One of the books he assigned was David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics. Stockman was a libertarian Republican who served as Reagan’s first budget director. At the beginning of the book, he provided a concise summary of why he thought limited government was beneficial to the American people. When the class discussed the book, one of my fellow seniors exclaimed, “This was very interesting to me! He seems like a good guy... I didn’t know that any conservatives actually cared about people!.” Kudos to this professor for enlightening my classmate, but how does someone get to her senior year of college without being exposed to the radical idea that not all conservatives are innately evil?While I'm certainly not shocked that someone in her senior year of college would have led so sheltered a life, I do consider it a failure of that university (and most universities) that there should be so little diversity of thought that this should happen.
One of my friends, who earned Ph.D.'s in both economics and political science, once told me about visiting an older uncle of his who'd never been to college. My friend told me of some of the opinions his uncle had offered and how they demonstrated that he'd never really had anyone seriously challenge him on them. Unfortunately, it appears that going to college wouldn't necessarily prevent that nowadays.
(As an aside, this reminds me of a conversation I once had with my sister-in-law. She's a typical northeast liberal who went to Columbia, quite possibly the most liberal of the liberal northeastern universities. She actually said to me, and I kid you not, "Republicans ... oh, I hate them so much!" The last time I'd heard a line like that was in some bad Saturday morning cartoon. And she was obviously assuming that I shared her political opinions. But then, why shouldn't she? She'd probably never met someone who didn't.)
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