With increasing regularity, ominous glimpses of America’s possible future appear on the cultural horizon. Like signal flares across the sky, these events and issues point to larger developments and fundamental shifts in the culture. They should not pass without notice.

The world of higher education is a prime context for shaping the next generation, and a look at developments on America’s elite campuses reveals a social revolution in the making. In moral terms, we are looking at chaos in the academy.

The American educational system is in an undeclared state of disaster, with competing ideologies and shifting worldviews undermining the very nature of education itself. In the state controlled school systems, ideologies of naturalism, secularism, materialism, and moral relativism shape the prevailing culture and worldview. A pernicious new imposition of “tolerance” as an ideology threatens to silence all voices resistant to absolute relativism. Herbert Marcuse, the radical philosopher of tolerance from the 1960s, would no doubt be thrilled to know that his ideology of intolerant tolerance has become so dominant.

Millions of American children are headed back to school even as a legion of students now descends on America’s college and university campuses. The “back to school” season is now a familiar part of family life and an important marker in the business cycle. By any measure, education is big business, employing millions of teachers and administrators and representing a large segment of America’s public investment. But, even as the new academic year begins, the edifice of American public education is showing its cracks all over again. In reality, the system is largely in shambles. How did this happen?

Over 200 years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, some conservative activists are calling for a new Bill of Rights to guarantee academic freedom. The proposed “Academic Bill of Rights” is designed to redress wrongs inflicted in ideological battle–and it’s important.

The Collegiate Network released its 2004 “Campus Outrage Awards” on April 1, but this was no joke–the outrages are all too real. The Collegiate Network encourages conservative student journalists and monitors the atrocities on America’s college and university campuses. The big “winners” in the 2004 Campus Outrage Awards were Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, though other universities came close in the running.

“Diversity” has become one of the central themes of higher education, and incessant calls for intellectual diversity are standard fare on America’s academic campuses. Nevertheless, diversity is evidently in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to conservative points of view, the diversity agenda hits a blind spot.