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Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes -- women's rights, gay rights -- the political class turns squeamishly away.

Working in a university as I do, I am simply flabbergasted by the extent to which the multicultural imperative has snuffed out critical thought. If the jihadists want to crush gays under brick walls and reverse all the gains women have made in the last century, it is our fault for pointing it out.

Several tenets, especially in the humanities departments, have become revealed truth, not to be challenged:

1. No one from group X is fit to criticize any action taken by a member of group Y, but only if group Y is a certified minority group.

2. The West is always at fault. Any datum offered to rebut this claim is evidence of racism or other hostility toward other groups. Any behavior that cuts against the Western grain is not a sign of a defect that must be overcome, but of something to which the West must accomodate itself.

3. Groups must always be defined exclusively around race, religion and sexual orientation - not occupation, not parental status, not political beliefs, only the tribal identities.

Lest we think this is something that only applies to academic flakes, let me assure you that day in and day out I see students who are thoroughly under the spell of the multiculturalist ethos, completely incapable of making cross-cultural comparisons if it means they must actually come to a critical conclusion. They are deeply inculcated in this by the time they get here, and it gets worse while they're here. Things are bad.

Indeed. The decline in the quality of critical thought in the universities since I was a graduate student some 30 years ago is amazing. I am currently going through the college admissions process with my eldest daughter and it is illuminating. Having been an academic, I can read between the lines in a faculty biography or a course catalog, and I am seeing huge variations in departments of interest among the better liberal arts colleges. In some cases, and we're talking about institutions of roughly equal prestige here (say the top 50-60 liberal arts colleges and some smaller prestigious but not top 20 univesrities), the course offerings are recognizable to me as comparable to what I did and what I taught. In other cases, the faculty are all interested in the new politically correct aspects of their disciplines and the course catalog is filled with the latest fads. We've been making it a point to meet with the heads, or senior faculty, in the departments my daughter is interested in to discuss the opportunities in the fields in each school and get a sense for how they're taught. Equally important in what was my field, I ask a few questions that elicit telling responses about the faculty's views. In some schools I've been pleasantly surprised, in others, sadly disappointed. Once it's over, perhaps I'll post something of my specific impressions, but for now, I don't think I'll increase the applicant pools at the places we liked.

"Things are bad."

Luckily for the biosphere, vultures and worms don't discriminate against anyone, no matter how extraordinarily irrational their belief systems are.

The young are starting to squirm under the suffocating pillow of PC highminded insanity. I retain hope.

Very sad, scary first-person commentary you give there!