First of all, a disclaimer: I tend toward the liberal more often than the conservative. Having said that, I don’t generally read liberal commentators, but almost always read George F. Will, a highly-respected conservative editorialist.

Fact is, I like Will’s logic and deliberative style, even though I don’t always agree with his starting points. Regardless of how I feel about his conclusions, there is a rational consistency there.

But more important to me, George is an independent thinker. He is unafraid of disagreeing with other conservatives, and he will criticize elected conservatives. This independence is sorely lacking in the world, although it is very much needed. I mistrust anyone who always agrees with their party, regardless of their political stance.

Having said that, I would like to disagree with one of Will’s current criticisms, that our colleges are dominated by liberal (or even radical) thinkers.

As a way of contrasting and comparing, consider that the US Military is the best-funded branch of government. If you add the Veterans Administration to that, Military funding increases significantly. Well, the men and women of the Armed Services, and the many businesses that support the Military, are conservative– by a wide margin. So we need to ask why that political disparity isn’t a concern.

Large corporate interests now influence our private time, by constantly advertising their services and products to us. Most of the entertainment and news outlets are now also owned by large business, and critics constantly decry the loss of independence in news. Big businesses are run and staffed by people who, not surprisingly, are almost all conservative. So here is an enormous educational counterbalance to our colleges, and one that influences us from cradle to grave, not just for 4 years. But there is no outcry about that.

And then there is the Church. The Religious Right says it all: serious church-goers are dominated by conservatives, who call on The Almighty Himself to counter the liberal universities. How could our institutions of higher learning ever expect to stand up to that? But partisan leanings in our churches don’t appear to bother conservatives.

So we have to ask Mr. Will if his concern about an influential part of American becoming too partisan? Or is he just worried that it aligns with the other party?

Next, there is a matter of critical thinking, which is essential not only to democracy, but also to free will, which is essential to religious doctrine. If we only expose our young people to one aspect of human political thought, only indoctrinate them in the ideology of one party, then we cannot say that we have faithfully discharged our obligations to our country, nor to our religions.

That’s an important point. Before and after college, corporate advertising and corporate news will be the main sources of information for our citizens. So if our young people aren’t exposed to liberal ideas in college, when will they consider them? When else will they get an opportunity to truly reflect on different ideologies and decide– decide for THEMSELVES– what they believe?

George F. Will has been a staunch defender of freedom of thought, and freedom of choice. He cannot argue now that we should deny young adults the full range of these freedoms.

It would be hard to argue that this liberal collegiate exposure has been detrimental to the conservative movement. To the contrary: despite many decades of dominance by liberal thinkers in our citadels of learning, in the past decade we elected the first unipartisan government since WW II– and it was conservative. This strongly suggests that neither the corporation nor the university dominate the mind of the citizen; her mind is her own. The citizen is exposed to diverse viewpoints, and this exposure strengthens the democracy, rather than weakens it.

Finally, if we consider what ‘conservative’ means– to conserve, to lean toward the traditional, to advocate the tried-and-true– then it is clear that our colleges absolutely must be liberal. If institutions of higher learning are, by design, our places of innovation, of theorization, and of experimentation, then it becomes clear that it is precisely the mission of the university to challenge the status quo.

Which means that a good university will always be liberal.

With deference to George F. Will, we should not be asking our universities to be anything other than liberal. That standpoint is critical to progress, and to our way of life.