"Given higher education’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism and political correctness, it’s no wonder that it’s seen as a ripe target for angry white men. To many Americans, we are, as one angry internet troll recently told me, responsible for producing the “social justice warriors” and “feminazis” who are supposedly destroying the world. In reality, “the university” in 2018 is mostly a constellation of underfunded, overextended public institutions that still serve mostly working-class and middle-class whites and smaller numbers of minorities, including some undocumented young people known as Dreamers. Those institutions rarely have the resources to target conservative students or brainwash students.

You could be forgiven for not imagining that university when people talk about liberal colleges and coddled professors. We do not appear often in elite media, which tends to focus on the fringiest and most outrageous goings-on at elite universities. But even elite institutions are not nearly as radical as the alt-right believes. They are, if anything, the finishing schools for conservative economics, social science and social policy. A handful of gender studies courses could not begin to check the power of an economics department or a business school at any university in the U.S. The college down the street from most Americans is a conservative institution that is sensitive to the pluralist needs of the students they serve because its economic viability depends on it.

Of course, racism does not need logic. White racist organizations are flourishing in the space between perception and fact, and in that space, the university is the mecca for aggrieved white masculinity to reassert its dominance."