The lone professor willing to sponsor a non-left student group at Vanderbilt was a business school professor from outside the Vanderbilt community. Because his primary occupation is actually business rather than teaching, this professor flies from his home in San Francisco to Nashville twice a week to teach his course. In other words, there are really no conservative professors in residence at Vanderbilt University who are willing to publicly sponsor a group whose purpose is to bring an underrepresented viewpoint to the Vanderbilt community -- even though it is a viewpoint shared by a majority of Tennessee voters and half the American public.

My Vanderbilt talk was scheduled for Monday, April 8, and on Jan. 12 Wake Up America had reserved the room where it would be given. But on Thursday, April 4, the Vanderbilt administration informed Eberhart that a professor now needed the room he had reserved for a review class, and that my speech would have to be canceled. Coincidentally, this happened to me on at least three other occasions on this spring tour alone. The University of Oregon canceled my appearance the day I arrived in the state on the grounds that a request for security for the event made two weeks earlier was one day too late, and the room had been given to another event, although my sponsors were not informed until one day before my announced appearance. NYU canceled the room for my talk there the day I arrived in New York, also because of an alleged room-scheduling problem, and James Madison University canceled, as I was about to depart for Florida, for the same reason.

In other circumstances, a young and well-mannered conservative like Eberhart might have capitulated to this petty harassment and terminated the event. Fortunately, he held his ground in this case, strengthened in his resolve perhaps by the fact that my office had been able to arrange a C-Span taping of the event. His resistance bore fruit, and permission was given to proceed, but not until Eberhart agreed to pay "for the wear and tear to the foyer" of the hall where the speech eventually took place. A $100 cleanup fee was also tacked on, even though no food or beverages were served and there was no refuse to clean up.

Despite a downpour, about 250 people showed up for the speech in Wilson Hall and listened civilly while I described "How The Left Undermined America's Security." The attendance was even more gratifying than usual because the Vanderbilt Hustler, which was the student paper, did not inform the campus community of the speech (or report on it after I gave it). This was not surprising, since the left-wing editors of the Hustler had refused to run my reparations ad the year before.

Afterward, I signed books and answered questions of those who stayed to ask them. One of my interlocutors was a professor of philosophy who handed me a yellowing copy of my very first book, "Student," published exactly 40 years earlier. In it, I described the first student demonstrations of the 1960s at Berkeley, where I was pursuing a graduate degree. I didn't realize at the time that we were going to transform American universities into politicized institutions, where only approved ideas would be welcome. I hope I would have had second thoughts about demonstrating then if I had realized this would be the outcome.

When I asked the professor what kind of philosophy he taught at Vanderbilt, he said with a smirk, "Marxist philosophy," then asked me to write the following in his book: "To my political enemy from a foaming at the mouth right-wing ideologue."

Humor seems not to be a radical asset. I signed the book, but with a different inscription (perhaps "second thoughts are best"), and he left. I was then approached by a group of undergraduates who by their appearance and questions were not politically conservative. A young woman with a diffident demeanor asked, in an earnest tone, what I thought of racial profiling.

Her question was inspired by a portion of my talk that addressed the problem of airport security. I had pointed out that nine of the World Trade Center terrorists were actually stopped by airport security on 9/11 because they had faulty IDs, but they had been allowed to board the planes anyway. I said that the Clinton administration's failure to institute adequate security measures prior to the attack was due in part to an ideological aversion to profiling Muslim terrorists.

I tried to explain to the student the difference between factoring race into a profile and using race as the profile itself. I referred her to Heather MacDonald's article in the conservative magazine City Journal, "The Myth of Racial Profiling," fully realizing as I did so that this undergraduate would never have heard of Heather MacDonald or the City Journal. Nor would she be familiar with the writings of virtually any living conservative writer including myself. I gave her the name of the Web site where MacDonald's article was posted and could be located. But I did so with a heavy heart, because I knew that the student had many questions, not one; that her parents were paying $30,000 a year to give her a good education, but that at Vanderbilt she would only be getting one side of the story and only one perspective on the ideological conflicts that would affect her life.

I had met students like this throughout my campus sojourns. The encounters were the saddest memories I took away with me. Millions like this young woman would pass through universities like Vanderbilt, which would routinely betray their trust. They would be given decks that were stacked, instruction that was partisan and partial, and there was nothing I or a small contingent of conservatives could do in one hour or during one event to alter these facts.

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