It’s not the professors

As a senior at this state’s flagship university, I take some umbrage at this paper’s recent editorial on the situation with Kaitlin Bennett at Ohio. I say “some umbrage” because I agree with some of the editorial’s points: It’s a shame that Ms. Bennett was unable to film her video, and parents paying for the children’s college education do need to be asking questions.

Where I disagree is in the statement that universities have become “liberal echo chambers.” In my 3½ years on the Hill, I’ve had professors from across the ideological spectrum: libertarians, moderates, conservatives, liberals, socialists, and even (gasp!) Trumpers. And I only know this because I’m a nosy Razorback and tend to ask professors in out-of-class conversation. I have not in my eight semesters had any tenured “robotic repeaters of the party line,” as the editorial alleges, and any class that verges on the political has always been open for discussion.

Instead, my experience has been that the kind of people who swarmed Ms. Bennett are students. To be clear, the would-be mobsters are a tiny minority of my classmates, maybe 1 in 100 at most, who are far to the left of liberalism. These echo-chamber inhabitants tend to be bored suburbanites who enjoy play-acting as “woke” Marxists, despite their upbringing in well-off nuclear families who pay for their luxury apartment and new car.

Like I said, parents need to be asking questions, but not of professors. Instead, parents, talk with your kids about politics every now and again to make sure they’re not being radicalized online. (I had the honor to grow up in Hazen, where the Internet’s too slow to load propaganda.) As for the rest of us, I’m pretty sure we’re safe. The revolution won’t be funded by mom and dad.

SAMUEL HARPER Fayetteville