Regarding George F. Will’s March 12 op-ed, “Academia’s prerequisite: Diversity or else”:

Even the most perspicacious conservative columnist, which Mr. Will certainly is, underestimates the “progressivity uber alles” philosophy that inhabits academia, especially in the Trump era.

There is virtually no concern in public colleges and universities for ideological diversity. At Towson University, where I am a professor, I moved in the Academic Senate last week that “ideological perspectives” be added to the long list of identity categories protected in hiring and treatment of employees. For the first time in my four decades at Towson, my motion died for lack of a “second.” Thus, by legislative fiat, the anti-conservatism that afflicts Towson — but not uniquely Towson — cannot even be discussed.

In the National Communication Association, the executive director and past three presidents have been openly hostile to conservatism. At the most recent national meeting, with hundreds of papers and panels, there were zero conservative-friendly titles but endless far-left topics. When asked how an organization justifies anti-conservatism in a field that ostensibly highly honors the “marketplace of ideas” and “academic freedom” credos, the director and one of the presidents refused to respond. The others apparently haven’t been asked.

There are exceptions to this totalitarian state of affairs, but the protagonists are mostly liberals who silently object to, say, the forcing out of the one conservative editing a major journal in my field, who wrote an editorial defending conservatism, but these good offended liberals won’t speak out.

Richard Vatz, Towson