Are college students being brainwashed by liberal academics? Some politicians believe the situation is so severe that they are introducing bills to protect students who are conservatives from vindictive professors who stifle any form of dissent. Republican-sponsored legislation is moving forward in several states to create an “academic bill of rights” for college campuses, which will also promote intellectual diversity among the faculty. Here’s my question: Why, oh, why do we need to legislate common sense when there’s a much cheaper and quicker answer to this problem?

The editor of the superb college guide “Choosing the Right College,” John Zmirak, said he thinks student activism and parental vigilance are more important than legislation, which must be monitored and then enforced. A Queens native, Mr. Zmirak was just such an activist as a conservative Yale undergraduate when he became involved with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which issues the guide. This nonprofit, nonpartisan organization was founded more than 50 years ago, and yet when I went to college I didn’t know it existed. Its first president was William F. Buckley Jr. According to its mission statement, posted at www.isi.org, the group “was established in 1953 to convey to successive generations of college youth an appreciation for the values and institutions that sustain a free and virtuous society.”

Any concerned parent with a college-age child needs to get this annual college guide, which gives the inside scoop on the nation’s top-rated schools. Mr. Zmirak said a staff of young journalists was sent to 134 top colleges to provide not only the essential facts about the institutions but to render balanced judgments of the colleges’ core curricula, values, and social and academic resources.

The guide gives the lowdown on local academic giants like Columbia University, NYU, Cooper Union, as well as upstate New York’s Cornell University and Colgate. Mr. Zmirak said that even though Columbia has a reputation for radical liberalism, it and its sister, Barnard College, still offer a core curriculum that teaches the ideas of the West. Columbia students still must read the great books of literature. By contrast, Mr. Zmirak said, “in the ’70’s, Harvard destroyed the core curriculum.” In his guide we learn that Harvard was “remade … as the model of the modern research university-afflicted by specialization, premature professionalism, and political correctness. Indeed, it was Harvard’s abandonment of broad-based liberal education that set the trend followed by almost every major university in the country.”

Armed with this guide and the resulting idea of what to expect at given colleges, parents can either prepare their children to weather an intellectual environment that may be hostile to their family values or simply select a college that enriches these principles.

Every time I watch a program about the antics of college students on spring break in Florida or Cancun, I can’t help but think how far removed that drunken debauchery is from the days of Annette and Frankie and their “Beach Blanket Bingo.” Co-eds now tear off their wet T-shirts for the leering cameras of strangers and some revelers don’t survive their beer-drinking contests. Spring break used to be a much-needed respite from the rigors of intense study, but has anyone been paying attention to what’s being taught in the hallowed halls of celebrated learning? Yale no longer has a core curriculum, but it does offer courses in mambo dancing, gay fiction, and suburbia. It still offers difficult courses such as calculus of functions of one variable, but guess which one your freshman will pick?

How about Princeton University, which still has the infamous Peter Singer as one of its professors of bioethics? The guide quotes what Mr. Singer wrote in his book “Practical Ethics”: “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.” I have a hard time respecting any institution that allows a person like Mr. Singer to influence young minds.

In addition to editing the college guide, which I heartily endorse for all parents (go to www.collegeguide.org), Mr. Zmirak has written a most delightful book, “A Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living.” There are so many of us, it’ll probably be a best seller.

But when it comes to the education of our young, he’s dead serious and recognizes the importance of getting back to the basics of teaching responsibly. Colleges are charging $25,000-$40,000 a year, but because high schools are failing to teach the basics they are no better than remedial summer schools. Americans who care about education in a free society, Mr. Zmirak said, need to support colleges, which make real demands of and dispense core knowledge to their freshmen.

If parents don’t do their homework, they shouldn’t be surprised if their offspring are brainwashed.