To all appearances, the University of California at Santa Barbara is the mellowest of campuses. A warm breeze wafts in from the ocean, a short walk from the dorms. Bicycle lanes wind below olive trees, and surfboards balance on handlebars. Before class, students line up below a leafy arbor to buy white-chocolate mocha latte and herbal tea. Next to the picnic tables where the Chinese-American Association and the Persian Club sell tickets to spring dances, posters beckon browsers to a string-quartet concert, a Millennium Marijuana March and a poetry reading by a transgendered Cuban political refugee.

But what's this? Leaflets posted by the College Republicans for a speech by former Reagan official Oliver North — "A Real American Hero" — are defaced with slogans in black marker: "Nazi!" "Baby-killer!" Counter-leaflets invite students to "See a Real Life Pro­Arms Dealing and Pro­Crack Cocaine Dealing Imperialist." Does this mean trouble in paradise?

Not at all. How dull campus life would be without passion and conflict — even if the students are occasionally rude. Neither large public universities nor sequestered private liberal arts colleges are immune to the push and pull from left to right, between multiculturalists and traditionalists, between politically correct and defiantly retro. "Why not confront these things in academia?" asks Alexander W. Astin, director of the Higher Education Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Learn what's true, and what's not true. Decide where you stand."

Related Story Secrets of Their Success Alma maters of the rich and infamous, plus surprising majors More On Where To Go Go Your Own Way Resist the lure of brands and rankings Which College Is Right For You How to sort through the tons of data The Two-Year Plan Community college can be a good place to start Faculty Face Time More colleges and universities are making sure students spend quality time with professors A Sporting Chance Strong academics and athletic glory make a great team Wired Ivory Towers Colleges are embracing — and investing in — technology

In picking a college, you may want to survey its ideological landscape — both academic and social. Do you want a rigorous education in the classics from Aristotle to Zarathustra? Or is a curriculum-as-buffet more to your taste, with courses in witchcraft and politics (Bucknell), sociology of rock (DePaul) and baseball in American society (Harvard)? Will you be comfortable in dormitories with coed bathrooms? What is most important to you? An atmosphere of free speech where anything goes, including insults? Or an enforced multicultural harmony where a fraternity cancels a luau because a Hawaiian student takes offense (Dartmouth)? Do you want to be surrounded by conservatives at California's Pepperdine University? Or would you prefer the left-wing Antioch, in Ohio, where students voted for convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal to give the commencement address?

Consider too the diversity of the student body. Will you find a predominantly white, middle-class college just plain dull? Most universities compete to attract minorities on the theory that a multicultural campus — with clarinetists and quarterbacks, Alabama African Americans and Texas Chicanos — is an education in itself.

"Culture wars" over curriculums make for fewer headlines these days, but they continue to roil campuses across the nation. When Georgetown University dropped its requirement that English majors take at least two courses in Shakespeare, Chaucer or Milton, the outcry sparked a survey of other universities. The results were jolting: Shakespeare may be the undisputed genius of English-language writers, but only 23 English departments among 70 top colleges required a course on the Bard. Should broadening the canon to feminist, Chicano, African-American, and gay and lesbian authors lead to jettisoning worthy dead white males? In Choosing the Right College, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's guide for the tradition-minded, former Secretary of Education William Bennett writes, "The central problem is not that the majority of students are being indoctrinated (although some are) but that they graduate knowing almost nothing at all. Or, worse still, they graduate thinking that they know everything."

A generation ago, most liberal arts colleges and universities required undergraduates to take a specific set of courses in Western civilization, generally including history, literature, science, philosophy, foreign languages and mathematics. But in the mid-1960s, the consensus over what constituted an educated college graduate began to erode. With the rise of identity politics, and its celebration of ethnic roots, the effort to impose a common culture was assailed as an outdated, authoritarian construct. From east to west, from Amherst College to the University of Washington, faculties backed away from any core curriculum. By the mid-1990s, a study by the National Association of Scholars found that a large majority of highly selective institutions had turned to "broad and nearly formless 'distribution categories,' catchalls for a vast array of only distantly related courses." Thus a student who once would have taken a survey of European history could instead pick a course on, say, "Russian Legal Institutions Before 1700." Says NAS president Stephen Balch: "The effort to provide a framework has been abdicated."

However, many professors and students like it that way. Faculty members, who get tenure by publishing original research, can teach the subject of their current project. Students can forgo what many find to be the shallowness of overly broad surveys in order to satisfy an immediate enthusiasm. "Western Civ. seemed like a high school history course on steroids," says Jordan Watson, 22, who took the introductory survey at Moorpark College, outside Los Angeles. Now, having transferred to U.C.-Santa Barbara as a chemistry major, he is enrolled in "Chicano Studies 139: Native American Heritage and Chicano Cultural Renaissance." The course satisfies the university's ethnic-studies distribution requirement. And Watson — Caucasian, registered Republican and scuba-diving enthusiast — has found it "eye-opening. The Chicanos were in California before the white settlers invaded," he says. "We are the ones who are not rightfully here."

Across campus, Katherine Elliott, a teaching assistant in "Asian American Gender Relations," holds up a Reebok ad before 13 sleepy students. In the spread, two figures, a geisha and a cowboy, don sneakers beneath the slogans eastern classic and western classic. "You are looking at gender stereotypes," Elliott coaxes. "You are either a dragon lady or a lotus blossom." One student brings up a recent Simpsons episode set in Japan. A nerdy-looking boy complains that he's been called a cowboy because he comes from Bakersfield.

Later, the section repairs to the main classroom where about 150 students watch a docudrama about a Korean American who flees to a women's shelter after her husband beats her. "How many of you know someone who has experienced domestic violence?" the professor asks. Nearly a quarter of the students raise their hand.

A lack of intellectual rigor weakens many "diversity" courses. At UCSB's "Chicano Studies 139," for instance, a visiting Native American lecturer suggests that eating kelp "flushes out" the effects of radioactive contamination. Another problem is a tendency to flatter, rather than challenge. As University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson has written, "We put aside the African novelist Chinua Achebe's abrasive, troubling Things Fall Apart and gravitate toward hymns on Africa, cradle of all civilizations."

True multiculturalists might wonder why ethnic-studies majors shouldn't be required to learn Swahili or Mandarin, study Islamic architecture, analyze Hindu epics. Shouldn't anthropological and biological research be as much a part of women's studies as the resuscitation of obscure female painters? An iconoclast might even be forgiven for asking whether the University of Michigan's course "How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation" should move out of the English department and onto the therapist's couch.

A campus that is friendly to minorities, feminists, gays and lesbians — multicultural in the best sense — does not necessarily entail a politicization of the curriculum. Such liberal institutions as the University of Chicago, Columbia and Brooklyn College require disciplined core courses. The University of California, Los Angeles, makes its English majors take not one but two Shakespeare courses. Yet graduation day at UCLA is an ethnic smorgasbord, with separate, supplementary celebrations for blacks, Asian Americans, Latinos, Filipinos, Native Americans and gay students.

Traditionalists portray academia as relentlessly liberal. And as labor unions fund and organize a high-profile antisweatshop movement with sit-ins and hunger strikes on more than 50 campuses, it might seem like the '60s redux. However, a network of national conservative groups subsidizes right-wing campus newspapers, challenges student fees when they are spent on left-wing groups and attacks "speech codes" that outlaw racist or homophobic comments. Guides such as the Templeton Foundation's 408-page Colleges That Encourage Character Development tout classes that "articulate a set of moral ideals" and programs that encourage sexual "self-control, respect and responsibility."

Is a backlash growing? Consider: last spring the University of California at Santa Cruz, a bastion of anything-goes progressivism, replaced its vaunted "narrative evaluations" with letter grades, despite student pickets charging grades are a method of sorting vegetables. The governing board of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., instituted two required courses on U.S. history and Western civilization, despite a censure motion by the faculty. As chairman of the board Edwin Meese, President Reagan's former Attorney General, explained, "Any educated person should know U.S. history and Western civilization, both of which are the foundation of the society in which we live."

It would be difficult to anoint a winner or loser in the campus culture wars. But in the swirl of ideological currents, hardly any aspect of student life is conflict free. Should Orthodox Jews be allowed to live off campus to avoid coed dorms? Yale ruled not. Should the Tufts Christian Fellowship be kicked off campus after barring a lesbian from a leadership post? It was, but Tufts reversed itself after protests. Should Harvard cafeterias serve grapes despite a farmworker boycott? Yes, students voted. And what if activists at Providence College, a Roman Catholic institution, post flyers with a picture of the Virgin Mary, reading: "How's this for an immaculate concept: Keep abortion safe and legal"? They were suspended.

At UCSB the spring quarter is traditionally a paean to political correctness. First comes "Take Back the Night" week, with a mock rape trial. Then comes Queer Pride Week, with a drag show and a mass wedding on the campus plaza for gay, lesbian and transgendered students. Then comes Black Culture Week, Holocaust Remembrance Week, Chicana-Latina Culture Week, Asian Pacific Culture Week, American Indian Culture Week and, finally, Middle Eastern Culture Day — all with lectures, movies, concerts and ethnic feasts. The College Republicans have no dedicated day, but Oliver North's speech, despite the dueling leaflets, is a hit. More than 500 students jam the auditorium, listening respectfully. Outside, a protester sets down his picket reading WHY ISN'T OLIVER IN PRISON? to shake hands with a young conservative wielding an OLLIE IS HERE! sign. Two days later, the Republican students join the College Democrats for their annual softball match and barbecue. The mood is multiculturally mellow.

Source: TIME/The Princeton Review's The Best College For You 2001