Guest Post: Ahh University

Recent graduate and co-author of an upcoming book with the bear, Ed Kozak has written another guest post. Never a man to mince his words, his last post caused quite a storm. Here he reflects on that bastion of left-wingery - university.

Ah, university. Having just graduated and, like so many of my fellow graduates, being unemployed, I've recently had the time to reflect on the past four years of my life. I was trying to think of what, if anything, truly defined my time at uni. Was it the boring lectures and seminars? Or maybe the heavy drinking and occasional use of rare herbs? Perhaps it was the ridiculous post-Marxist bullshit masquerading as 'social' and 'economic' history I had to learn as a historian, destroying all real interest I ever had in the subject. Close, but no.

What truly defined my university experience was, in a word, opposition. Opposition to the legions of left-wing students of various shapes and sizes, opposition to their monopoly on student government, opposition to their bullying tactics and oppressive measures that monopoly enabled them to implement, and opposition to the P.C. propaganda shoved down our throats at every turn as 'fact' or 'truth'. You see, for a conservative-libertarian like myself, a university isn't just an academic institution, the time spent there no simple educational experience. It is, rather, a sort of mild form of torture, each lefty slogan yelled and lefty action taken a drop of water on the forehead, driving one slowly insane.

I've been interested in politics for years, and strongly right-wing for almost as many. But when I graduated high school I was under the impression that my political views would mellow out, that I'd inch closer to the political centre with each passing year. I was leaving New Jersey, that bastion of rampant left-wingery it is. I was going back to the United Kingdom, there had to be like-minded conservatives there, right? Maybe not ones as avidly and gun-totingly libertarian as myself, but still conservatives nonetheless. After all I could only assume that there would be others who loved Margaret Thatcher as much as I did, especially having had to deal with New Labour for the better part of a decade. Of course there were and, being one of maybe five conservatives I knew growing up in the States, that was wonderful. But then there were the lefties. And they were everywhere.

I wasn't at university too long before the alarm bells started ringing in my head. As I walked through the square where lectures were held and through the union buildings for the societies fair, I could hear Robin Leach's voice in my head; welcome to lifestyles of the left and dirty, with their champagne socialism and communist dreams. Seriously, before I went to university, socialist was just a dirty word, an insult I used to fling at my Democrat-supporting buddies in America. Surely after the horrors socialism inflicted upon the twentieth century - the horrors of National Socialism, the mass starvation, torture, and murder in the USSR, the crimes of men like Pol Pot and Che Guevara - no one could possibly think it was a good idea. How wrong I was.

I was soon taken over slowly by the painful realisation that I had landed squarely in the middle of one of the most oppressive, free-thought-stifling, bleeding-heart, left-wing environments imaginable. I would see and hear things that would make Hilary Clinton and Stalin blush. To put it bluntly, the amount of utter left-wing crap spewed daily from the mouths of students and professors alike astonished me. I couldn't help but recall Thomas Sowell, 'socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only and intellectual could ignore or evade it''. God was he right, and I certainly couldn't ignore or evade the plethora of lefty radicals, of tree-huggers and champagne socialists, working-class heroes and coffee shop revolutionaries that populated my university.

Ah, university. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Editor: Three guesses what the book is going to be about.