Mark Bauerlein of See Thru Edu has written a new post in which he explains why new generations of college students always seem to find heroes on the radical left.

The Inscrutable Campus and the New Left Background

One of the many frustrations that critics of ideological trends in higher education face is that so many of our audience do not recognize extreme cases as significant to the overall intellectual condition of the campus. They hear about Ward Churchill and think, “Boy, he’s a wild one,” and that’s all. Churchill ran a large “studies” department for many years at a flagship public university, overseeing personnel and curriculum, and prospering in a complex academic machinery, but outsiders don’t register the validation of his outlook and how it might have had a wide local influence.

Or they think the same thing about the Michigan State creative writing professor who ranted about Republicans who have “raped” our country, and the same thing about the American Studies Association boycott of Israel. However heated and forthright are those extremists, they are quickly dismissed as wacky academics, a type that the campus environment has had and will always have, and the best thing to do is to tolerate them when we can and punish them quietly when we cannot, or if the story hits the media, make our punishment so circumspect and deliberative that the administrators look clean and upright.

One reason for this un-serious judgment of Leftist extremists, I think, is because people don’t see any genesis for their existence. They are anomalous, wrong-headed, short-sighted, and local, the judgment goes. They don’t have a history, which is one reason why they can be dismissed.

This is a mistake. These behaviors are, in fact, a remnant of New Left words and deeds, but I don’t know of any way to impress outsiders of that origin without having them read direct and convincing reminiscences of those years. How do you draw a line between kids at Brown University disrupting a guest lecture in 2013 and students shutting down classes in 1969 if people know nothing about campus protests back then? How can you demonstrate the similarities between the Group of 88’s tactics and the conduct of faculty members long ago who commiserated with and supported disruptive undergraduates when nobody remembers the latter?