If the government-sponsored drought doesn’t drive people out of California, the education system should. One California English professor (that’s a professor of California English, not just one who lives in the state) argues in his book that students should be exposed to liberalism in college. Johnathan Marks reviews Donald Lazere’s Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias.

Here’s the idea: “Neither mainstream liberals nor mainstream conservatives question the ‘unmarked norm’ of capitalism, and consequently students don’t question it either. ‘Isn’t there something to be said,’ then, ‘for … preserving in the human imagination … socialist ideals,’ and ‘mightn’t college liberal arts teachers … be indulged in this role, like the monks who preserved the manuscripts of classical humanists?'”

Marks goes on to destroy Lazere’s arguments with facts, which I won’t repeat here. “Lazere’s great narrowing of the aim of higher education encompasses more than his wish that it occupy itself with preserving the thought of the left. Because Lazere thinks that not only ‘unmarked norms’ but also the deliberate efforts of a ‘conservative attack machine’ have prejudiced students against the left, exposing that machine becomes an important aim of ‘general education.'” (via Prufrock)