There's diversity at Harvard?

"Cello," part of "Chamber Orchestra" series of concert-instrument interiors by Studio Mierswa-Kluska, featured in the Boston Society of Architects' Architecture Boston.

"There's diversity at Harvard? Where are the conservatives?" asks a skeptical bflat879 in the comments of Harvard graduating economics concentrator Shreya Maheshwari's myopic Harvard Crimson essay "The Social News Network," a touchingly naive take on the narratives that be:   

It’s great to use Facebook to filter through our personal and commercial interests. But when this filter extends to our intellectual life, it can trap us in an online echo chamber by gradually minimizing our interaction with opposing thoughts and cutting off our engagement with the broader world …

Even students at Harvard, with all its emphasis on diversity, aren’t immune to default social and intellectual collusion."

EVEN students at Harvard? Emphasis on diversity? If you want diversity, see Senator Scott Brown challenger, Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," lily-white Elizabeth Warren (0% Cherokee, 100% Bullshit). Who needs Maheshwari's "online echo chamber" when you've got the politically correct mindset of academia itself? Michael Barone explains in "Life in a cocoon dulls political responses":

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

We've been there forever, of course. As we wrote a few years back in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.  Enter the bloggers, stage right.  As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics …

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature. The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and — of course — the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

Update: Doug Ross is on the same wavelength:

Old media is literally committing suicide in front of our very eyes. In its desperate rush to see Barack Obama reelected, they are ignoring bigger and bigger stories. People have the Internet. They read The Drudge Report. They listen to talk radio. They read blogs. And in spite of all of these different access points, old media is ignoring blockbuster story after blockbuster story.

Update II: Heh. Instalanche! Thank you, Professor Reynolds.

Update III: Doug Ross links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View.

Comments

[Teresa]

If bflat879 is a student at Harvard, there is a tiny ray of hope that real thought among students is not completely trampled.

[goomp]

I hope the voices of the free society are allowed to continue to be heard. Believers in the myth that a favored intellectual group have the wisdom to drive the population like a herd of cattle have been known to suppress freedom of speech and expression of thought.

[gs]

It's shameful and foolish how Scott Brown has treated people who struggled to get him elected, Sissy Willis prominent among them. I will not say that Brown deserves reelection...but the alternative is Elizabeth Warren. This post of Sissy's at least mentions Brown by name.

Is a sleeping dragon stirring?

[Realsaveliberty]

Thank you,Sissy! Intellectual diversity - who knew?:o Maybe someone should teach a course.