What does the US exchange rate have to do with a Canadian company selling Turkish guns in Canada ? I also said that Wednesday the price was 319 . 95 , and yesterday it was 349 . 95 <| sep |> Technically , his last words were . oh . <| sep |> Note This is a badly worded question , and trying to answer it is like trying to eat soup from a cardboard box . This was one of the things that I had to wrestle with when thinking of an answer to this question , so I ' ll do a little piggyback on your answer . Liberal can mean different things depending upon the context and the time . It is not is not a continuous phenomenon and selfdescribed liberals in a 1950 academy would practice a different brand of politics than one in 1975 or 2016 . Nineteenthcentury American liberalism , while it pushed for Humbodltian universal education , also often took various racial and ethnic biases as a given that would be anathema for many liberals in the the latter quarter of the twentieth century . The situation of the academy in the 1940 s and 50 s exemplifies how sudden political shifts could alter the political composition of faculty and how some political values like academic freedom proved to be quite tractable . The early Cold War American academy was fairly liberal in its politics , but it was also incredibly anticommunist . Both faculty and administration engaged in selfpurging by firing faculty for alleged communist leanings and loyalty oaths were quite common features of the early Cold War campus . The American Association of University Professors AAUP was silent over these violations of academic freedom and the AAUP was generally deaf to entreaties by its members over politicallymotivated firings . Longtime AAUP gneral secretary Ralph Himstead , who in prior decades was quite active in investigating charges of unjustified firings , was desultory and tardy in this case . The Association , the AAUP ' s magazine , in 1956 obituary praised Himstead ' s impatience with such ' liberals ' when ensuring that the academy dealt with the communist threat logically . Although both McCarthyera administrators and the AAUP were excoriated in the 1960 s by the New Left , Ellen Schrecker ' s study of the academy , No Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the Universities concluded that many faculty willingly complied with the purges . This forced a shift in the political orientation of the academy . As the great intellectual historian Carl Schorske recalled in a 1987 speech that many liberals and other fellowtravelers turned inwards with their liberalism , embracing existentialism and other lesspolitically vulnerable forms of politics . McCarthyism drew a long shadow over the American academy even though campuses and administrations became more liberal . Schorske recalled that in 1964 when the faculty invited the noted Marxist Herbert Aptheker to campus , the administration refused to pay for it , leaving the faculty to pay for his visit out of pocket . But one of the larger lessons of the academy in McCarthy period was that both faculty and administration proved quite willing to change or ignore their ideological commitments in favor of selfinterested expediency when it came to daytoday operations . Even as the New Left emerged in the late 1960 s and 70 s into positions of power in the academy , there was often a disconnect between the professed politics of the faculty and their actions . Black and women ' s studies departments often struggle for funding or tenured positions . One of the persistent critiques in academia ' s public sphere like the Chronicle of Higher Education is that the established professoriate is often indifferent to the challenges of nontenure track faculty or faculty unionization , or in some cases use their positions to exploit graduate and undergraduate labor , despite professing politics that should make them sympathetic to these issues . As the above indicates , liberal is not only a word freighted certain assumptions that do not always conform to reality . Moreover , assuming that liberalism is somehow a static phenomena ignores the subject ' s complexity .