This is Carol Platteley Bell for townhall.com.

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 points 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.