Free speech on campus

[Big Papa Goat]

As a political science student, I can say that most of the teaching I've received has had a bit of preaching in it, and some of it has had a lot of preaching. But this isn't just from the 'left', as if intellectuals were exclusively leftist, there's plenty of conservative intellectuals in the poli sci department at my school that give their side of the story too.

I think a reason the criticism of 'preaching not teaching' tends to come from the conservatives in the direction of the progressives is that conservatives scholars tend to see ideas and ideologies as being more significant than progressives. As far as I've noticed, an aspect of a lot of progressive thought is the notion that ideas simply justify the social and historical circumstances from which they emerged (or, in the case of progressive ideas, try to acheive social change through, I dunno, 'raising consciousness' or some other equally inane concept).
In any case, conservative political thought in the twentieth century has focused a lot on the history of modern political ideas, and the way various thinkers have influenced various other thinkers from machiavelli to marx. And basically the opinion has been that most of these philosophers, from machiavelli to marx, have all had more or less revolutionary ideas that have corrupted everything fine and decent in the world.