This caught my eye in the first article:
In short, they dream of him returning from school an educated gentleman, whose piety and patriotism have been enhanced by an exposure to learning and high culture. Yet what remains after four years at the contemporary university, after the professors have had a chance to mold him according to their own vision of New Progressive Man? A dope-smoking, Che-Guevara-T-shirt-wearing foul-mouthed serial fornicator, whose conception of the higher moral life comprises recycling and voting a straight Green Party ticket, and whose idea of "spirituality" is hanging out with other New Age flakes at a Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. He has been taught nothing about his religion except that it is a repressive sham, nothing about sexual morality except that there isn't any, nothing about his country and its history except that it is "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and insensitive to people in wheelchairs, and would be much better if only if it was more like the country his parents had crawled under barbed wire to escape from.
My first response was that it's pretty nasty. The second was that there was some truth in it. My third response is that undergrads and recent grads are bound to be silly and sophomoric -- whatever ideas they adopt. Young people are bound to go through a lot of follies, whatever they are exposed to in college. Many don't go through the "dope-smoking, Che-Guevara-T-shirt-wearing foul-mouthed serial fornicator" phase. Others survive it and come out the other side.
There's no doubt that some professors live in ways Feser abhors and promote immorality, but whether students pick up bad habits from what they hear in class is another matter. More likely, both students and faculty are influenced by a consumer culture that promotes the vices Feser condemns.
And are parents really so naive today? There are colleges that claim to promote traditional values and culture, but parents, like students and faculty, usually choose other options. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe more should be known about traditional education, but I don't think parents are as naive about what colleges teach and how students live as Feser claims.
The identification, though, of immorality with voting for the Green Party or "caring" about people in wheelchairs is a cheap shot, on par with those who'd argue that voting Republican is equivalent to killing whales, drilling for oil in Yellowstone, or starving children. It relies on taking as a single inseparable bundle things that don't always go together. The notion that Feser's child might turn out well-behaved, courteous, and responsible, yet vote in ways he doesn't approve of, or ill-behaved, loutish and irresponsible, yet accept his own political opinions, doesn't seem to occur to him.
In other words, Feser's attack reflects a scattershot, us against them point of view that doesn't grant that one's political opponents, however mistaken or misguided they are, may have legitimate reasons for supporting the causes that they do. So when Feser uses dismissive cliches like that, how can he complain when he hears other cliches and insults thrown back at him?
A lot of political commentary today is simply feeding the beast of factional animosities. The assumption seems to be that battle ranks are drawn between two camps that are hostile all up and down the line. In fact, things aren't so polarized.
A lot of people accept some views that Feser would regard as left and others that he would regard as right. He's certainly on target in seeing the universities as tilted heavily to the left, but he ignores the wider context of public debate that's more evenly balanced on the whole.
So yes, most professors are on the left, especially in the humanities and social sciences. And yes, a lot of young people do move left in college, and many do act irresponsibly and immorally. Many would do so even without college. It's natural for the young to be rebellious. But as time goes by most people end up on the center or the right.
I don't minimize the grounds for concern: the ideologies that dominate the universities usually make an impact on the politics and culture of subsequent decades. But it's hard to prevent young people from being foolish and trying out ideas that strike them as new and daring. Not questioning, examining and criticizing those follies, fads and fashions would be a mistake, but so would lumping them all together and attacking or suppressing them as a package.