Liza Libes entered Columbia University in New York City as a self-described liberal. By the time she left with a master’s degree in 2020, she identified as a conservative — a shift she attributes to repeated clashes with professors over what she was allowed to write in her English classes.
Libes, who earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 2019 before completing a master’s in English and comparative literature the following year, told Fox News Digital that her grades seemed to track the politics of her arguments rather than their quality.
“I would get Cs when I would argue in favor of the patriarchy. And then when I argued that, you know, so-and-so was subverting gender norms, then I would get an A… It was just this kind of gradual accumulation,” Libes said.
One incident Libes points to involved an assignment on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” A professor framed the play around “queer desire,” she said, but Libes wrote her exam without addressing that theme — and lost points for it.
“I just wrote about the play, I didn’t touch on queer desire. She took off a couple points from my exam because I didn’t mention queer desire in the class for the midterm. So I thought that was a very bizarre thing for her to do,” she said.
Libes, who now runs the Substack “Pens & Poison,” said other instructors applied what she called a Marxist framework across literary works more broadly.
“There [were] a couple other professors [that] I really disagreed with in terms of the way that they were teaching literature, the way they were kind of creating this Marxist ideology from a lot of literary works and kind of thrusting the Marxist teachings on so many great works of literature,” she said.
She described the experience as stifling for a writer, and a turning point in her political identity.
“I felt very stifled as a writer and I think that that was kind of my last straw,” Libes said. “I wanted to be in a place where I could just… express my values, express my beliefs in writing and also in conversation… By the time I was a senior, I very much identified with the conservative movement.”
Beyond the classroom, Libes said there was a social cost to dissent. She recalled an unspoken
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