Groupthink Central neatly dissects the reasons certain rightwingers are always banging on about “campus radicals”:
This is precisely what annoys me about this “leftist PC thugs on campus” crap. The reason why righties like Bernstein get so histrionic about this topic is not because campus leftists stifle debate or impose their worldview on everyone else (trust me, they don’t) but merely because they exist. It goes without saying that leftists (forget “radical”) are virtually invisible in politics, media, and business. The only institution where they have any significant presence is on college campuses. This presence, in my opinion, makes righties like Bernstein uneasy, and this uneasiness leads him and his conservative compatriots to lash out against leftist academics, by concocting all sorts of nefarious schemes involving leftist conquest/hegemony over academia. The above reference to think tanks is also perceptive, as I think that many conservatives and libertarians like Bernstein hole-up in think tanks (CATO, AEI, Heritage, takeyerpick) for this precise reason–their ideas are never challenged, they get oodles of money for churning out sparkling propaganda for their corporate masters, and they get to bitch about leftist tyranny on campus from a safe distance. This is why, when conservatives like Bernstein gather the courage to enter the academy, they invariably overreact when confronted with differing opinions and ideologies. It’s a complete shock to their worldview. Thus, they instinctively lampoon/caricature leftist colleagues and students as authoritarian monsters, so that their sense of intellectual/ideological supremacy remains unchallenged. Sad, isn’t it?