“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”

Such is the intolerant orthodoxy of Academia. A University of Oregon student named Dan Lawton – who claims to be neither conservative nor Republican – did the research and found that of all the 111 registered voters in the faculty of the Journalism, Poly Sci, Law, Economics, and Sociology departments, only two were registered Republicans. When Lawton asserted via school newspaper that this disparity didn’t present an intellectual variety to students, he was met by some stinging attacks by Oregon oppressors professors.

The anger makes sense to me, insane as it is. Academia is a bastion of liberalism, where phony intellectualism, tenure, and sport coats with elbow patches ensure a kind of comfortable status unknown in the real world. When professors feel like that bastion is threatened, they lash out.

Here’s a question for the class: If you feel secure with your contributions to the world, do you react by dropping F-bombs on a college student?

Presumably, no. As the Dan Lawton wrote, this brittle Academic wasn’t the only agitated professor.

A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Is that the liberal professor party line on conservative students? “Go back to Texas, you Jefferson Davis-loving melon farmer!” Oh, the independent-mindedness of higher education.

Time to go back to one of my favorite phrases: these are the people teaching your kids, folks.

Is it a surprise that the University of Oregon faculty was so heavily liberal? Of course not. Is it a surprise that, once confronted with that information, at least one of these faculty members couldn’t fly below expletive level? Of course not.

Popular education in the United States is largely worthless. When Big Education isn’t making kids dumber, it’s making them fatter. Instances of molestation and sexual harassment are high. Education is important, but the sedentary/lecture style employed by Americans today does more to prepare kids for sitting on their butts all day than actually help build skills and talents. (By the way, talents can be built.) I can’t help but think many a professor understands the futility of their chosen profession on some level.

It makes sense that liberals flock to Academia like procrastinating students flock to free pizza. Academics get to wax philosophical over mocha lattes while students are forced to teach themselves how to produce things, generate wealth, and contribute to society. Really, teaching a college class full-time is like a government job: you’re not there to actually produce anything, you’re just there to fit the butt-cheek mold of an empty seat. I can see why liberals love it.

Challenging this liberal orthodoxy means facing the wrath of petty adults playing teacher. This Dan Lawton wants more conservatives in university faculty? I wouldn’t wish that on conservatives. And anyways, the system won’t provide the solution. The system is the problem.

So, to engage in intellectual discourse befitting Big Education institutions:

[Expletive] Academia.