Politics & Power Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

Schlafly’s line is built like a classroom anecdote, but it functions like a political weapon. By leading with “the most frequent complaint I hear,” she converts unverifiable chatter into a statistical-sounding reality. “College students” becomes a strategic mouthpiece: the young are cast not as radicals, but as put-upon consumers who just want the product they paid for, free of ideological add-ons. The move is savvy because it flips a long-running stereotype of the campus left; the student is recast as the aggrieved party, the professor as the intrusive proselytizer.

The phrase “inject their leftist political comments” does a lot of covert work. “Inject” implies contamination, something foreign entering a body that should remain clean and neutral. The subtext is that education has a proper domain - “the subject” - and that politics, specifically “leftist” politics, is an illegitimate trespass. That framing quietly assumes the default setting of a classroom is apolitical, or at least politically unmarked; only the left “has politics,” while the status quo reads as normal.

Context matters: Schlafly built her career opposing liberalizing institutions, from feminism to the broader cultural authority of universities. The quote taps the late-20th-century conservative critique of academia as an elite pipeline manufacturing dissent. It’s also a preemptive strike against expertise itself: if professors are ideologues, then their credentials stop being a claim to knowledge and start being evidence of bias. The brilliance - and the danger - is how easily it recruits even non-conservatives who resent being lectured, turning irritation into a worldview.