"The most frequent complaint I hear from college students is that professors inject their leftist political comments into their courses even when they have nothing to do with the subject"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
|---|
More Quotes by Phyllis
Add to List
