Please don’t impose Tom Wolfe’s portrayal of licentious behavior at his fictive Dupont U on your children. His description of life at America’s top schools, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is captivating even when he describes appalling behavior. Trust me, college is not that hedonistic and undisciplined.

Fortunately, neither are universities as monolithically “progressive” and politically correct as he implies.

Wolfe majored in literature at W&L and earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. He studies high and popular culture and sociology and has little interest in the process of scientific, technological, or medical advancement. Thus he lumps quite disparate academics together.

Wolfe portrays faculty culture as leftist and relentlessly PC. Do these radicals really determine the academy’s zeitgeist? Actually, they are a highly visible and vocal minority. True, academics are predominantly liberal and vote Democratic by large margins. Few, however, are as sorry as Wolfe’s caricatures.

The reason is clear. It’s most difficult for an honest scholar who understands core principles of ecology, economics, engineering, or evolution, to submit to the “progressive” silliness, hypocrisy, and bigotry Wolfe presents as faculty norms at Dupont.

The most extreme behavior captures attention. For example, consider Hamilton College, an elite liberal arts school in upstate New York. (Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranks it in the top 120 schools.) Its “Gender, Society, and Culture” project recently hired convicted felon, ex-Weather Underground leader, Susan Rosenburg. Indicted for aiding in the killing of police officers (nine children were left fatherless), she was apprehended in 1984 for illegal weapons and 740 pounds of explosives. Sentenced to 58 years in prison, President Clinton pardoned her in January of 2001.

Hamilton hired her because she “offers a unique perspective as a writer.” Indeed. (So did a visiting professor of French who quit Hamilton after trying to clone a baby aided by a group believing in extraterrestrials.)

Consider The Chronicle of Higher Education, the No. 1 news source for college and university faculty and administrators. In its Nov. 12 issue, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein explains why “Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual.” He refers to programs where a leftist orientation dominates, mainly in literature, history, and most departments with “studies” in the title. They are insulated from and ignorant of classical liberal, libertarian, and conservative ideas. Challenges to their prevailing PC orthodoxy are rare. Arguable positions become sureties.

Bauerlein describes the pathology: “Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with compatriots, the more one’s mind narrows.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks notes one result: “Students often have no contact with adult conservatives, and many develop cartoonish impressions of how 40 percent of the country thinks.”

Dan Chirot, at the U of Washington, points out the left’s hypocrisy: “[T]he academic left...isn’t liberal at all, but closed minded, hostile to science, and in general disdainful of the Enlightenment. To be liberal means being open to reason and evidence, believing in the basic values of the Enlightenment (which is what America is all about), and being skeptical of absolutist reasoning.”

Charlotte illustrates how sloppy and dishonest ideology degrades America’s self-proclaimed betters. This blame-America-first crowd dominates the intellectual environment of Dupont U and, Wolfe implies, at other top schools.

As with sex on campus, Wolfe exaggerates this real and troubling pathology. And like America’s deficit economy, this is not a stable situation. Ultimately, the zeitgeist bites back.*

Dan Chirot wrote me: “There is clearly a counter movement. Harvard’s president, a distinguished economist and former Secretary of the Treasury, may be moderately liberal, but he is no wild-eyed lefty by any means. Harvard just hired Steve Pinker, whose book The Blank Slate is attacked by the academic left because he believes in science and takes seriously the evidence that evolutionary pressures have shaped much human behavior. Harvard’s extremely popular introductory economics course continues to be taught by Martin Feldstein, who is moderately to the right of center.”

Discretionary funds are the most valuable. They often come from successful alums, few rich by accident. Most are smart and respect America and institutions that foster civility and well-being. And some are rebelling.

Successful university administrators understand the implications, even if the angry left cannot. The zeitgeist bites back. Wolfe tells us why.

*With thanks to Geoffrey Norman.