In a series of essays this year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has argued that liberals in academia—people like me—are intolerant of, and politically biased against, conservatives on campus. “Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious,” he wrote in “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” in May. “We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.” Later that month, in “The Liberal Blind Spot,” he took on critics of his earlier piece, writing, “Frankly, the torrent of scorn for conservative closed-mindedness confirmed my view that we on the left can be pretty closed-minded ourselves.” And this month, apropos of campus reactions to Donald Trump’s victory, Kristof warned his massive progressive audience about “The Dangers of Echo Chambers on Campus”:
We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological…. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us—so long as they think like us.
