I wonder how much college conservatives would pay at a bake sale?
Quote of note:
Want to talk real power? If the faculty clubs are blue, corporate management offices are red. In the name of diversity, let's trade some liberal sociologists for conservative oil executives.
Those Poor College Conservatives
By Ellen Goodman
Saturday, December 4, 2004; Page A23
…The authors of the faculty survey put it this way: "The social sciences are pretty much a one-party system." They add, "A campus that had six males to one female would be universally recognized as very lopsided." So, they infer, is a campus that's 7-to-1 Democratic.
Well, let us not forget that campuses are still lacking in the old-fashioned kind of diversity. As for lopsided? Among full professors, 87 percent are white and 77 percent are male.
But as someone who has long argued that people tend to hire those they feel comfortable with, I get the idea. I also get the idea of ideological diversity. You can, after all, have ethnic and gender pluralism along with intellectual uniformity. The Bush Cabinet is the case study of a multicultural rainbow of political clones.
What is fascinating, however, is to see how the campus-watchers have usurped the language of liberalism for their own. It reminds me of the arguments in favor of teaching creationism in the name of open-mindedness.
The conversation about liberal bias on campus is chock full of words such as diversity and pluralism. There is even the hint that universities may need a touch of affirmative action for conservative academics. What next? Quotas for Republican anthropologists?
