A while back, Atrios asked, “Why do so many conservatives always complain about campus leftists?” Not to be outdone, Matt Yglesias echoed that sentiment and added his own plausible deniability of the question’s relevance by way of anecdote and comparison:

As a centrist college student, the campus left bothers me a great deal, but that’s because I need to live next door to them. Here on summer vacation, the whole thing just fades away. I like to think that when I’m old I won’t be any more outraged by the politics of Harvard undergraduates than I will be about the low quality of the dining hall food. The growth of the campus left since the late 1960s has, after all, coincided with an era of great success for actual conservative politics and it matters a great deal more who runs the country than who runs the universities.

In the comments section on each of these sites, I tried to answer the question from my perspective as a classical liberal / sometimes conservative with pedagogical ties to the academy, but with disappointing results (on Matt’s site, for instance, my response was met by the sound of crickets chirping and tumbleweeds tumbling; on Atrios’ site, by enigmatic quips or else full-scale attacks on my intelligence — though not by Atrios, I hasten to add). Thankfully, UPenn English Prof Erin O’Connor has taken the time to formulate a much more detailed and thoughtful reply (heavily annotated with hyperlinks).

Please. Go read it. And read the other installments in her series on campus leftism, as well.

—–