Cultural Offering remembers his college days:
Reagan had just "survived" the economic recession and was preparing to blow up the world. My professors reacted to conservative views with attitudes ranging from puzzlement to disgust. In my Capitalism Versus Socialism class the socialist viewpoint was ably represented by a former SDSer; the capitalist viewpoint was butchered by a professor with views barely to the right of the socialist prof. It wasn't that they couldn't understand conservatism; they had no interest.
My experience was similar. I never had a problem with decidedly left-wing professors - one of the best teachers I encountered was a Marxist teaching assistant - but their knowledge of conservatism was cartoonish.
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As a student activist in 1963 I recall that our group in Tallahassee was suspicious of
SDS because they seemed too extreme. We were picketing a couple of segregated restaurants at the time but the ranks of those then called "liberal" were not as cohesive as they are treated today. Nor did they/we behave the same.
Likewise, those we were opposing were far more dangerous. I was expelled from my apartment without notice when a neighbor learned what I was doing and the landlady supported his threat to come after me with a gun if I was not out of the place in three hours. We knew better than to call the police because they were cut frfom the same fabric.
It makes me very sad when I see words like "liberal" and "conservative" used and abused so carelessly.
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