My four years at Connecticut College was a pretty good oppurtunity to figure out exactly what is wrong with the academic system in America. You can read about Professor Pessin's ill treatment for criticizing Hamas, elsewhere, and my personal "enlightenment" has not left me loving the college from a personal level as well. After expressing opposition to abortion in a class which I was unceremoniously heckled out, I got the distinct pleasure of having a series of rumors spread by students and our irresponsible professors about me somehow finding out which students had gotten abortions(I honestly have no clue how one would even go about this)and going around personally harassing them. No, harassment at this campus is a tactic reserved for the privileged group that more and more dictates what can and can't be said in this stifling, anti-intellectual, echo chamber. If you share the standard "academic" left system of beliefs, and want to have people congratulate you on how wonderful you are for four years, you would have a great time here. If you don't think dissent is some kind of hate crime, however, you would probably be better off somewhere with a view of free speech a little more ahead of the 14th century.

Of course, none of this would be possible without an administration willing to allow if not blatantly encourage these witch hunts. After going through a rather idiotic class where I had to have these rather incredulous accusations being bandied about as truth by my professor, I got to sit through increasingly inane conversations with various administrators who similarly were unable to comprehend that people exist in the world that do not parrot their beliefs, and that these people aren't amenable to being treated like some kind of bottom feeder. My favorite experinece in this mind numbing parade of hypocrisies was my conversation in which a member of the "Office of Institutional Equity and Inclusion" told me that the solution to the rather abhorrent treatement meted out to me by by faculty was to "find people who think like me". This was actually the best advice I ever got from admin, who never denied nor denounced that I was being harassed by faculty members. They are, after all, too busy making public statements on carbon taxes, a hillarious fact when one considers that colleges are generally exempt from taxes, and the school president is a flutist, not a climate scientist or economist, so I'm not sure why anybody should really care.