Carol Platt Liebau: Depriving Our Students of the Diversity That Matters

Thursday, May 28, 2026

It’s commencement season again—another class of young Americans heading out into the world. But one statistic says a lot about what they’re leaving behind: at top universities this year, left-wing speakers outnumber others six to one on commencement stages.

That lack of viewpoint diversity point to something deeper: An intellectual climate marked by intolerance and conformity, not curiosity and debate.

There was a time when a college degree signaled that a student had learned how to think—and had encountered the ideas that shaped the Western tradition. Today, that’s no longer a safe assumption.

Too often, higher education has become dominated by a narrow ideological framework, with too few faculty willing—or able—to model real intellectual rigor.

The result is predictable: universities that once fostered inquiry now too often enforce orthodoxy.

That’s not education. It’s indoctrination.

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