Diversity: The Façade of our Intolerant Institutions

 

 How much diversity do we find in the media and the university? Although we claim that we value diversity as the necessary condition for free-thinking, it has become an endangered commodity, perhaps even secretly detested. Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World Magazine, cites one evidence of our antipathy towards diversity:

• Our academic high places are hives of the left. The Daily Princetonian says 155 members of Princeton University faculty or staff donated to Barack Obama, and only two (one visiting lecturer in engineering, and one janitor) to Mitt Romney. I’ve seen similar stats from other schools. When taxpayers and parents pay tens of thousands of dollars to require students to listen to leftist propaganda from generally persuasive individuals, should we be surprised that young people vote left? (Dec. 1, 2012, 80)

The greater tragedy is that our young people, taken captive by this ubiquitous and uncontested radical message, leave the church as a consequence, while others remain but with a highly compromised faith.

Meanwhile, our secular institutions, while extolling their unshakable commitment to diversity, deny that there is any bias. However, it has become obvious to anyone with eyes, that these institutions have become instruments of brainwashing – propaganda mills, secretly maintained through discriminatory hiring practices. “Social activists” are now the censors for the radical left whose mostly lofty goal is the tarring of any speakers who fail to conform to their politically correct agenda.

They have converted institutions that had been safe-havens for the exploration of ideas, even unpopular ones, into restrictive, intolerant single-thought pep-rallies. This problem is so ubiquitous - and accreditation agencies serve this narrow secular agenda - that Christian colleges hire faculty imbued with the worldview of the secular university. It is therefore, not at all surprising to find concerned Christians issuing warnings:

• You’ve probably heard the statistics, that 50% of Christians abandon their faith during college. It would seem that many Christian students are not prepared to enter the liberal environment of a secular college classroom, where more than half of all professors view Christians with hostility and take every opportunity to belittle them. One study showed that private colleges with a religious history – but have cast aside those roots – were most detrimental to students maintaining their Christian faith; up to two-thirds of Christian students give up their relationship with God at these institutions. Sadly, even many so-called “Christian” colleges are entering into apostasy (turning away from Christ). Just because a school calls itself a Christian college does not always mean that the teaching provided is Biblical. 

Secularism exercises a strangle-hold on public discourse, although there seems to be one media outlet – Fox News - that provides an economic and political alternative to the mainline medias, most forms of counter-left thinking are given little or no expression. There is no mention of the supportive reasoning for traditional marriage, pro-life, sexual abstinence, objective moral absolutes intelligent design and many other conservative issues. In fact, many have been fired and denied tenure for even quietly holding such beliefs.

Today’s secularists ironically regard themselves “free-thinkers.” However, the facts – their obvious intolerance for other ideas, failing school systems and falling SAT scores – speak loudly against their hubris.