Help Wanted: Only Conservatives Need Apply
[Guest post by DRJ]
The University of Colorado at Boulder, home of Ward Churchill and the Pot Smoke-Out, is so liberal that even the University’s Chancellor is searching for a right-wing professor to add diversity to the campus:
“How liberal is the University of Colorado at Boulder? The campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners. A recent pro-marijuana rally drew a crowd of 10,000, roughly a third the size of the student body. And according to one professor’s analysis of voter registration, the 800-strong faculty includes just 32 Republicans.
Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. “We should also talk about intellectual diversity,” he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation’s first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.
Mr. Peterson’s quest has been greeted with protests from some faculty and students, who say the move is too — well, radical.
“Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?” asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. “I’d rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective.” Even some conservatives who have long pushed for balance in academia voice qualms. Among them is David Horowitz, a conservative agitator whose book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” includes two Boulder faculty members: an associate professor of ethnic studies who writes about the intersection of Chicano and lesbian issues, and a philosophy professor focused on feminist politics and “global gender justice.” While he approves of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, Mr. Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like “an animal in the zoo.” We “fully expect this person to be integrated into the fabric of life on campus,” replies Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.”
Chancellor Peterson is (surprise!) a Republican and he hopes to lure conservatives to campus as visiting professors — people like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, columnist George Will and Philip Zelikow, who chaired the 9/11 Commission.
However, even Chancellor Peterson knows it’s going to be a hard sell. That’s probably why he acknowledges that the visiting professors of conservative thought may not actually be conservatives. After all, some French teachers aren’t actually French.
— DRJ
Dave STFU. Any move toward reality on the campus at Boulder would be a welcome move toward reality.
papertiger (fbc22c) — 5/13/2008 @ 2:37 pmSo what if the token conservative professor is a curiosity?
One person armed with truth is a majority.
Not one of those wishy washy “if it feels good do it” liberal fraudulent professors will be able to match him (or her).
I don’t see why the chair in conservative thought would be limited to those who are ideologically conservative. I’d imagine it would be for those who study conservative thought academically.
stef (87fe55) — 5/13/2008 @ 2:40 pmso now we conservatives are supposed to applaud tokenism and quotas and affirmative action and hiring not on the basis of one’s talent in a particular field but rather on the basis of their political mindset? I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a stunt by the left: get the right excited about this, then use this as ammo every time the right objects to an affirmative action/quota program.
if UC-Boulder wants to have a faculty that was 100% liberal, let them. If their customers (students, parents of students and graduates with fat checkbooks) are okay with that, then that’s fine by me. What the market needs is not a few conservative tokens here and there, but the higher ed equivalent of FoxNews.
stevesturm (f8b3ed) — 5/13/2008 @ 3:22 pmGosh, I’d feel a little intimidated being the only professor of a certain leaning-among all opposed? Yikes.
Miss Havisham (01e60f) — 5/13/2008 @ 4:24 pmYes, and freshly installed as well (he follows former US Senator Hank Brown, also a Rebuplican). The left desperately tried to block Pererson even though he comes with fairly good credentials. As is usually the case with lefties, their objections, when boiled down, amounted to the R after Peterson’s name. A long way of saying that if he is trying to hire conservative professors, it is not a stunt, and should be encounaged. Actually, most important would an effort to excise the ubiquitous (leftist/Marxist) indoctrination from the social science non-hard science curricula. In fact, I’d be happy with a professorship honest and unafraid enough to lay their personal biases out for scrutiny.
On a personal note, I took some graduate level courses at CU (School of Engineering). One will not be surprised to hear that I saw no overt activism, nor covert bias in either the classroom or professors. I will say however, I am damn glad my degree came from nearby Colorado School of Mines instead of CU-Boulder. Not that CU doesn’t have a damn good engineering school, it does, rather the image, or notoriety, that the CU community has allowed to stain its product name.
bains (656914) — 5/13/2008 @ 5:47 pmPrepare for a caricature of what conservatives think.
I agree with Steve. If a retailer wants to target a core demographic, that’s smart business. But if every retailer goes after the same one, it’s tough to differentiate, making it harder to bring in customers.
And if every retailer ignores a certain demographic, the lack of competition makes it more profitable to go into that niche.
But I don’t think UC Boulder needs a new form of affirmative action to move into that niche. They should worry more about changing the culture that’s driving conservatives away.
just_some_guy (269d4b) — 5/13/2008 @ 6:05 pmI spent three weeks on the CU-Boulder campus in July of 1985, attending the National Institution of Trial Advocacy’s National Session — a sort of post-graduate boot-camp for intermediate-level trial lawyers of all types (not just, or even primarily, plaintiffs’ personal injury lawyers). I liked the campus, and I liked Boulder, just fine. But then I also liked my alma mater, UT-Austin, notwithstanding its nicknames of “Berkeley-Southeast” and “Sodom on the Colorado.”
Colleges and universities are important, and I lament the lack of ideological tolerance on most U.S. campuses. But I don’t think CU-Boulder is much, if any, out to the left of the pack. And I’m much comforted by the natural counterbalance provided to the academy by the real world.
I’m vastly more concerned by the likes of Obama’s chum and comrade, Bill Ayers, who are using college campuses as a safe haven from which to radicalize and propagandize primary and secondary public education levels, in much the same way that al Qaeda used the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Beldar (836c92) — 5/14/2008 @ 12:57 amStef, yeah, right. Just like you know conservative thought. You barely know your own far leftwingnut thoughts.
I think this university ought to hire a chair of liberal thought and that person ought to be Ben Stein.
PCD (5c49b0) — 5/14/2008 @ 4:53 amYou know why this isn’t going to work, right? Take a look at the Denver Post article:
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_9244192
About twelve paragraphs down, they talk about the proposed salary and some of the prospective candidates. How many of those people will turn down jobs paying at least six times that much consulting for, say, a defense firm, or lobbying for the next Halliburton?
There’s a reason higher ed is dominated by liberals, and that’s because they’re more interested in affecting a positive change in the world than they are in increasing the size of their bank account.
CU_alum (5bdb21) — 5/14/2008 @ 10:48 amCU_alum,
Hell, I’ll take that salary!!! I’d have to rob a lot of drug dealers to make that much.
PCD (5c49b0) — 5/14/2008 @ 11:00 amCU_alum shows us just how out of touch of reality CU alums are. That’s what CU is full of, ignorance of people that don’t agree with them. Boulder is a little enclave nestled between the mountains and reality.
SPQR (26be8b) — 5/14/2008 @ 11:00 am“… they’re more interested in affecting a positive change in the world …”
If they were truly interested in the above, they would be out in the world changing it, instead of being cloistered in their little “ivy covered” tower, insulated from that world.
Anyway, who says that any of them are capable of competing out in the world?
“Those that can do;
Another Drew (8018ee) — 5/14/2008 @ 11:43 amThose that can’t teach!”
“If they were truly interested in the above, they would be out in the world changing it, instead of being cloistered in their little “ivy covered” tower, insulated from that world.”
There is a whole lot of education that is not ivy league. Specially not at the state school level.
stef (5e2e3a) — 5/14/2008 @ 12:17 pm“ . . . they’re more interested in affecting a positive change in the world than they are in increasing the size of their bank account.”
More likely, to their vast surprise and outrage, their degrees in Seventeenth Century Feminist Thought and The Physics of Evil White Guys Falling failed to bring to them the adulation and remuneration to which they felt entitled as
bobby b (361921) — 5/14/2008 @ 12:45 pmCU alum – unintended irony and unintentional humor is the best. Kudos.
JD (5f0e11) — 5/14/2008 @ 1:04 pmNo wonder our collages and universites are failing i mean their getting more stupid its a wonder they havent voted to has a voting booth for animals
krazy kagu (b3db14) — 5/14/2008 @ 1:33 pm(Oops. Continuance of #13:)
. . . representatives of The Reality-Based Aristocrats, and the idea that the barbarous and unwashed Others who are Not Them, or, worse, So Not Them As To Be Conservative, are making the bigbux which they themselves cannot seem to achieve completely infuriates them.
Their hatred of “the rich” stems from this jealousy. They were supposed to be the Elect, not those low-class money-grubbing ex-jocks and potheads.
bobby b (361921) — 5/14/2008 @ 2:45 pmSQUAWK SQUAWK MY PARROT IS SMARTER THEN YOUR COLLAGE GRAD SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK
krazy kagu (1d713f) — 5/15/2008 @ 9:42 am