Today we're going to be talking about universities. Are they Marxist? And the spoiler is, no, they're not.

Representative Elise Stefanik recently issued a fairly typical conservative criticism of the university.

She told Fox News, we need to focus on engineering, math, science, the classics, and instead they're training not the next generation of leaders, but the next generation of Marxists. That kind of rhetoric about university campus

Marxism is common on the right. Many professors are Marxist or other varieties of radicals

who hate America. Phyllis Schlafly warned in 2005. Sebastian Gorka

laments in his book that we've ceded education to the radical left. J.D. Vance says the

professors are the enemy. He's quoting Richard Nixon there. And if you read the Sacramento Observer,

you can read an editorial arguing that pro-Palestine protests are a long-standing, part of a long-standing trend toward Marxist indoctrination within our universities.

Now, I've spent a lot of time in universities, and I've always found it a little difficult not to laugh when I hear professors described as Marxist.

Seems pretty out of touch with the reality of academia, which is fairly apolitical place for the most part.

The percentage of professors who subscribe to the doctrines of Karl Marx is, as far as we can tell, vanishingly small.

Now, we don't have great numbers on it.

In 2006, there was a survey

of American professors. That found that only 3% of them are self-described Marxists. When I was in

college in 2007 through 2011, which was at Brandeis, a very liberal university, which was known

for having graduated Abby Hoffman, Angela Davis. I studied political

theory for four years. I never had a single professor who showed any hint of being a Marxist.

They were a bunch of liberals without any revolutionary instincts. And I actually don't know if I

was assigned a page of Marx during four years in the politics department. I did take a course

in the history department on the history of the conflict between Marxism and anarchism,

but the professor wasn't actually a Marxist or an anarchist.

He was just a cynic about all ideologies.

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