Diversity Adulation

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Diversity adulation
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When's the last time you said to yourself, "I'd better have a little more diversity in my life"? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft director tell his fellow board members that the company should have more diversity and manufacture kitchenware, children's clothing and shoes? You'd probably think the director was smoking something illegal.

Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and make it a multimillion-dollar operation. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; the universities of Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.

George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this in an article titled "Some Questions about Diversity" in the Oct. 5 issue of "Clarion Call." Mr. Leef suggests that only in academia is diversity pursued for its own sake, but there's a problem: Everyone, even if they are the same ethnicity, nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two people are from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many important respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs, recreation preferences and other characteristics.

Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a requirement for social justice -- to right historical wrongs. The problem here is that if you go back far enough, all groups have suffered some kind of historical wrong. The Irish can point to injustices at the hands of the British, Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of Indonesians, and Armenians at the hands of the Turks. Of course, black Americans were enslaved, but slavery is a condition that has been with mankind throughout most of history. In fact, long before blacks were enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word slavery comes from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were early slaves. White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial America. So what should the diversity managers do about these injustices?

When academics call for diversity, they're really talking about racial preferences for particular groups of people, mainly blacks. The last thing they're talking about is intellectual diversity. According to a recent national survey, reported by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in "Intellectual Diversity," 72 percent of college professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent conservative. Liberal professors think their classrooms should be used to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently abandoned a provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using the classroom for propaganda. The president said the regulation was "outdated."

Americans, as taxpayers and benefactors, have been exceedingly generous to our institutions of higher learning. That generosity has been betrayed. Rich Americans, who acquired their wealth through our capitalist system, give billions to universities. Unbeknownst to them, much of that money often goes to faculty members and programs that are openly hostile to donor values. Universities have also failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.

What's part of Williams' solution? Benefactors should stop giving money to universities that engage in racist diversity policy. Simply go to the university's website, and if you find offices of diversity, close your pocketbook. There's nothing like the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.



Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

[valpotentate]

A poorly written, poorly argued, intellectually vapid article. Let me sum up some of the "highlights":

1) Diversity is so stupid only academics worry about it. As an example, Microsoft doesn't attempt to sell shoes.

2) Lots of universities find diversity so important that they actually have people in charge of focusing upon it.

3) Diversity is used as a form of social justice, which doesn't work because everybody's been wronged.

4) Rich benefactors are being victimized by mostly liberal professors who are using the classroom as an avenue to teach propoganda that runs counter to capitalism.

How do we right this horrible wrong in America? (This is the best part)

5) All you rich people, if a school pays attention to diversity, don't give them money. That'll show Juilliard, Harvard, Virginia, Toledo, MIT, etc.!

It's hard to get anything out of this article, Rick, but how about this: Why do you personally believe that 72% (according to this article) of professors identify as liberals?

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The more pertinent question is why don't YOU believe it?

College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page C01

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."

Religious services take a back seat for many faculty members, with 51 percent saying they rarely or never attend church or synagogue and 31 percent calling themselves regular churchgoers. On the gender front, 72 percent of the full-time faculty are male and 28 percent female.

The findings, by Lichter and fellow political science professors Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, are based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools. The researchers relied on 1999 data from the North American Academic Study Survey, the most recent comprehensive data available.

The study appears in the March issue of the Forum, an online political science journal. It was funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group that has given grants to such conservative organizations as the Independent Women's Forum and Americans for Tax Reform.

Rothman sees the findings as evidence of "possible discrimination" against conservatives in hiring and promotion. Even after factoring in levels of achievement, as measured by published work and organization memberships, "the most likely conclusion" is that "being conservative counts against you," he said. "It doesn't surprise me, because I've observed it happening." The study, however, describes this finding as "preliminary."

When asked about the findings, Jonathan Knight, director of academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors, said, "The question is how this translates into what happens within the academic community on such issues as curriculum, admission of students, evaluation of students, evaluation of faculty for salary and promotion." Knight said he isn't aware of "any good evidence" that personal views are having an impact on campus policies.

"It's hard to see that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students. In fact, a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college."

Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte find a leftward shift on campus over the past two decades. In the last major survey of college faculty, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1984, 39 percent identified themselves as liberal.

In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.

The liberal label that a majority of the faculty members attached to themselves is reflected on a variety of issues. The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" (88 percent). What's more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party.

Recent campus controversies have reinforced the left-wing faculty image. The University of Colorado is reviewing its tenure system after one professor, Ward Churchill, created an uproar by likening World Trade Center victims to Nazis. Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences voted no confidence in the university's president, Lawrence Summers, after he privately wondered whether women had the same natural ability as men in science and math.

The study did not attempt to examine whether the political views of faculty members affect the content of their courses.

The researchers say that liberals, men and non-regular churchgoers are more likely to be teaching at top schools, while conservatives, women and more religious faculty are more likely to be relegated to lower-tier colleges and universities.

Top-tier schools, roughly a third of the total, are defined as highly ranked liberal arts colleges and research universities that grant PhDs.

The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).

The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.

"In general," says Lichter, who also heads the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, "even broad-minded people gravitate toward other people like themselves. That's why you need diversity, not just of race and gender but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective."

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Study finds liberals dominate faculties

By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES - March 30, 2005


Nearly three-quarters of faculty members at U.S. colleges and universities describe themselves as liberals, and at elite schools, the proportion is 87 percent, a survey has found.
What's more, half say they are Democrats and 51 percent indicate they seldom or never attend church, according to the survey, published in the March issue of the online political journal Forum.
"You would expect the majority of English literature and sociology professors to be liberals, but our survey found that 66 percent of those in physics and 64 percent of those in chemistry are liberals," said S. Robert Lichter, a communications professor at George Mason University and an author of the study.

In English literature, 88 percent are liberals and 3 percent are conservative, the survey found.
"And in sociology, 59 percent said they are Democrats and 0 percent said they are Republicans," said Mr. Lichter, who also heads the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
In addition, more than two-thirds of faculty members surveyed say they either strongly (44 percent) or somewhat agree (23 percent) that a "homosexual lifestyle" is acceptable. About 84 percent say they support abortion rights.
The survey, based on data from the 1999 North American Academic Study Survey, questioned 1,643 teachers at 183 four-year higher-education institutions nationwide.
It also found that 15 percent of college faculty members overall consider themselves conservative and 11 percent say they are Republicans. Fewer than a third (31 percent) describe themselves as regular churchgoers.
The findings were compiled by Mr. Lichter, in collaboration with Stanley Rothman and Neil Nevitte. Mr. Rothman, the study's director, is a retired political science professor at Smith College. Mr. Nevitte is a political science professor at the University of Toronto.
Said Mr. Lichter: "This is the richest lure of information on faculty ideology in 20 years. And this is the first study that statistically proves bias [against conservatives] in the hiring and promotion of faculty members."
Mr. Rothman agreed. He said the survey "clearly showed" that faculty members who are "conservative, religious and female are less likely to get good jobs" on college campuses and be promoted than other women.
"Republicans get worse jobs than Democrats," Mr. Lichter said.
The ideological shift to the left among college faculty has become much more pronounced in the past 20 years. In a 1984 survey by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 39 percent of faculty said they were liberals. (Mine)
Peter Sprigg, senior director of policy studies for the Family Research Council, said the study proves that "American academia is overwhelmingly dominated by liberal secularists."
He said it's time they engage in real "diversity" and hire faculty members who reflect the values and "conservatism of Americans at large."

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Take a poll at VU. I'd bet greater than 73% of full-time faculty are liberal. I know. I used to teach there. Given the shift towards the left (from the study) since I was there, it might even be 90%. Why do think they are a "liberal arts" school?

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What's the matter? You don't like my man Walter Williams? He's a brilliant man and a scholar with a truckload of common sense. Too bad you don't recognize that when you see it.

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valpotentate said:

A poorly written, poorly argued, intellectually vapid article. Let me sum up some of the "highlights":

1) Diversity is so stupid only academics worry about it. As an example, Microsoft doesn't attempt to sell shoes.

2) Lots of universities find diversity so important that they actually have people in charge of focusing upon it.

3) Diversity is used as a form of social justice, which doesn't work because everybody's been wronged.

4) Rich benefactors are being victimized by mostly liberal professors who are using the classroom as an avenue to teach propoganda that runs counter to capitalism.

How do we right this horrible wrong in America? (This is the best part)

5) All you rich people, if a school pays attention to diversity, don't give them money. That'll show Juilliard, Harvard, Virginia, Toledo, MIT, etc.!

It's hard to get anything out of this article, Rick, but how about this: Why do you personally believe that 72% (according to this article) of professors identify as liberals?

Not exactly a brilliant rebuttal.

[rick]

2002 Study
New Study Reveals Extreme Partisan Bias Among Faculty
by Christopher Chow

A new study by the American Enterprise Institute reports that there is a large disparity between conservative and liberal faculty on campus.

National election results for the past forty years demonstrate that Americans are rather evenly divided between liberal and conservative party lines. The 2000 presidential election resulted in each major candidate receiving forty-eight percent of the popular vote. Four years before that, Bill Clinton was reelected by a margin of nine percent. Elections considered to be landslides in American politics such as Lyndon Johnson's 1964 election victory over Barry Goldwater show the winner with only sixty-one percent of the vote and the loser receiving thirty-nine percent. A new study of the party affiliations of college professors proves a massive gulf between Right and Left. Liberal professors often outnumber conservatives by ten to one and sometimes by more than twenty to one on campus.

"Today's colleges and universities are not, to use the current buzzword, 'diverse' places. Quite the opposite: They are virtual one-party states, ideological monopolies, badly unbalanced ecosystems. They are utterly flightless birds with only one wing to flap. They do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America," concludes the study.

Volunteers for the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture investigated Board of Elections' records in the locales of nineteen of the nation's most prestigious colleges to examine the political party registrations of the professors at the schools. Professors were classified as "liberal" if they were registered with the Democratic Party, Green Party, or Working Family Party. Professors in the Republican Party or Libertarian Party were classified as "conservative."

Eli Lehrer, who conducted the study, told Campus Report, "We sent students in each of the colleges to their local Boards of Elections and had them get lists of the faculty members and look up registration cards. Now, this only works in the states where you register by party and where voter records are public.... We tried to get a good sample of colleges."

The professors were categorized by their academic departments, such as political science, economics, journalism, English, history, and sociology. "Lest critics accuse us of cherry-picking only fringe disciplines, we have stuck mostly to major, uncontroversial, and socially significant fields of study," states the report.

The study concluded, "Colleges like to characterize themselves as wide-open places where every thought can be thought, where any opinion can be held, where all ideals and principles may be pursued freely. The demonstrable reality, however, is that you will find a much wider-and freer-cross-section of human reasoning and conviction in the aisles of a grocery store or city bus."

Liberals outnumber conservatives 18 to one at Brown University. At Cornell University, the number is even higher, with liberals outnumbering conservatives more than 26 times. Penn State displayed a bit more balance, with the ratio of liberals to conservatives being six to one. Even the smallest disparity, at the University of Houston, had a ratio of three liberals to one conservative.

Of the 166 professors examined at Cornell University, only six were conservatives, with no conservatives at all in the fields of history and sociology. There were likewise no conservatives in these fields at Brown University.

Some of the largest disparities were found in the University of California system. UCLA, for instance, has only nine conservatives for 141 liberals. UC-Santa Barbara had only one conservative professor in the 73 examined. At the four UC schools surveyed, there were only five conservative political science professors compared to 90 liberals.

At UC-Berkeley, only seven of the 66 professors noted were conservatives, with none in the department of sociology. "It's not surprising to a lot of the more conservative students on campus because you often find classes where it seems very apparent," the editor-in-chief of Berkeley's student newspaper The California Patriot, James Gallagher, told Campus Report. "The problem is, a professor has the right to be in any party, ideology they want to be. But when they let ideology come over into their teaching that's when we have a problem.... Because there is such a bias, because there are so many professors who do identify with more of the Left that you have a lot of professors out there who let their ideology interfere with how they teach a class. That's not really learning, that's not really seeking any truth."

"Conservatives are exposed to [prejudice] because we are a minority. And as a minority you just have to be prepared to defend yourself," Berkeley Political Science Professor A. James Gregor told Campus Report. He thinks that conservative professors are a "minority" and that in his own experience Berkeley has gone out of its way to attract liberal professors. "All these things I think are in-house problems in any academic institution. Most of conservatives are located in the natural sciences because they don't have to deal with popular opinions, prejudices, and so forth. In the talky, chatty sciences, you find liberal thought."

Professor Gregor believes that this political bias has generated a loss of respect for academe. "You know how Americans are, they mostly dismiss academics. They just simply say, 'Well, what do you expect from academics?' Ten miles from Berkeley people say, 'Oh, Berkeley; what do you expect from that place?' It's a trifle bizarre and everybody knows it. We have naked students walking on campus to test the limits of their civil rights. It's an outdoor lunatic asylum. And I think most people outside of academe treat it that way."

Extreme liberal bias was found even in states generally thought to be conservative, such as Colorado. Colorado's governor, its senators, and four of its congressmen are Republican, as are many of the voters in the state. Yet, Republicans constitute a fringe group at the University of Colorado, a state-funded school. In fact, the University of Colorado was one of the most liberal schools of those surveyed, with liberal professors outnumbering conservative professors by more than 23 to one. An earlier, more comprehensive study conducted by the Rocky Mountain News found a 31 to one Democrat to Republican imbalance among faculty at the school. Lehrer told Campus Report he didn't expect the divide to be so great in traditionally conservative states. "We had data from Cornell and Stanford and looking at it I thought maybe people were registered as Democrats just because those are Democratic towns and you'll often register in a party that has a lot of people in it."

Lehrer told Campus Report that he was surprised by just how vast the political divide was. "I was a little bit surprised. I really didn't expect it to be as unbalanced throughout the country."

Brown University's Political Science department's chairman, Allen Zuckerman, denied that there was any bias in the hiring process at Brown. "There are two issues here. The criteria for employment and the issue of the political views of the faculty. The association is to my mind nonexistent. It may be that faculty tilt toward the liberal end but that has nothing to do with why they have been hired," Zuckerman told Campus Report. "I've been at Brown for thirty years. There are all kinds of reasons that go into searches. Political views to my knowledge have never entered into it. Now maybe the pool of candidates suddenly tilted to the liberal end of the spectrum, but that particular issue never comes up."

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From the issue dated September 24, 2004- Chronicle of Higher Education
Conservatives in a Liberal Landscape
On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised
By JENNIFER JACOBSON

Robert G. Natelson, a full professor at the University of Montana's law school, wants to teach constitutional law.

Four times he applied to teach the course when there was a vacancy. Four times he was denied. Next spring he will get to teach the course on a temporary basis, but only because of recommendations from an outside mediator.

Mr. Natelson says the university's reluctance has nothing to do with his scholarship and teaching -- and everything to do with his conservative political views.

"The law school apparently views this course as politically sensitive and has kept it in liberal hands for over 20 years," he wrote in appealing the latest rejection.

"They're striking right at the heart of my career," he says, "and I have to fight for it."

The university denies that charge, but whatever the final outcome he could not have chosen a more fitting time for this battle. In this election year, when the only thing a polarized American public seems to agree on is that the divide between right and left is greater than ever, some conservatives are waging a war over what they see as the lack of professors like them in the academy. Liberal dominance of higher education has gone on far too long, they say, and has curtailed the free exchange of ideas that colleges should foster.

David Horowitz, president of the California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, has led the charge to make academe less politically one-sided. He has urged Congress and state legislatures to adopt his "academic bill of rights," a set of principles that he says colleges should follow to create intellectual diversity on their campuses.

To the dismay of his many critics, Mr. Horowitz's national campaign has experienced some success: Legislation to enact his proposal is moving forward in 19 states, and last spring public universities in Colorado promised to do more to follow the spirit of the document.

"If liberals and leftists were excluded from faculties to anything like the degree conservatives are, there would be a national howling going on," says Mr. Horowitz, the son of high-school teachers who lost their jobs during the McCarthy era because of their membership in the Communist Party.

Many educators who describe themselves as liberal, or even moderate, take issue with that assessment.

"There's much more diversity in the academy than the conservatives on the right represent there as being," says Carol T. Christ, president of Smith College. Reflecting on her own experience (before Smith, she spent 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley), she says she knows professors who have a broad range of views on the economy, the Middle East, and the war in Iraq.

The numbers of conservatives and liberals in academe are hard to come by. But a survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles provides some insight. Of more than 55,000 faculty members and administrators in 2001-2, 48 percent identified themselves as either liberal or far left; 34 percent as middle of the road, and only 18 percent as conservative or far right.

The result of that disparity, conservative professors say, is a skewed education for many students, and an uncomfortable workplace for themselves.

Self-described conservative academics -- like Mr. Natelson; Berkeley's John C. Yoo; and James D. Miller, of Smith -- and those who have been pigeonholed by others as right of center -- such as John H. McWhorter, of the Manhattan Institute, and Carol M. Swain, of Vanderbilt -- say they face unique challenges among a sea of hostile liberals. They lament the professional opportunities they have missed and the social ostracism they face. The perception that they are "evil" by virtue of being conservative ranks high on their list of grievances.

As Mr. McWhorter, a former Berkeley linguistics professor turned pundit, says, "There's nothing I'd like better than if most people who gave me that label didn't mean a**hole."

A Public Stand

When Montana hired Mr. Natelson in 1987 to teach property law, his colleagues were not aware of his politics. That all changed in 1993, when he publicly opposed a state tax increase and went on to run unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for governor in 1996 and 2000.

Last fall, after again being denied the constitutional-law teaching assignment, the free-market conservative, who has published nine scholarly articles on constitutional law, was convinced that political discrimination was to blame.

"There's a uniform history of allowing faculty members to move from the courses they're teaching into vacant courses," says Mr. Natelson, who taught courses in property law, real-estate transactions, and legal history last year. "And the only time that has been broken is when I've applied to teach constitutional law."

Last month a Montana lawyer that the university hired to mediate the case agreed, recommending that the professor be allowed to teach constitutional law next spring on a temporary basis. The university's president accepted the recommendation. But several members of the law faculty have continued to protest the decision.

"The problem is, our law school has a culture where it's not receptive to an exchange of views," says Scott J. Burnham, a Montana law professor who describes himself as an independent. He disagrees with Mr. Natelson's politics but supports his attempts to teach constitutional law. "We put more of an emphasis on getting along," Mr. Burnham says. "We're a small faculty, so I think Rob is perceived as rocking the boat."

But it is not always clear that politics is the cause of professional discord -- and such is the case with Mr. Natelson. The hearing officer did not consider whether the professor had been discriminated against on the basis of his politics, finding only that Mr. Natelson had been treated unfairly. So the university's president, George M. Dennison, directed E. Edwin Eck, dean of the law school, to establish an independent committee to evaluate Mr. Natelson's teaching, scholarship, and service in deciding whether to assign him to the constitutional-law course permanently.

Mr. Eck, who calls himself a conservative Republican, says he was disappointed, but only because he felt that the ruling would hamper his ability to consider teaching evaluations in assigning professors to teach courses. Some evaluations, he says, had criticized Mr. Natelson for a lack of collegiality with both students and professors.

Gregory S. Munro, a professor at the law school, says he doesn't believe that his colleague is being discriminated against. "The problem lies in his ability to work and play well with others," he says.

Mr. Munro, who says he votes for Democrats, notes that the faculty voted 15 to 1 to conduct a national search for the constitutional-law position. "Professor Natelson can apply along with everyone else," he says.

Students Protest

John C. Yoo is, like Mr. Natelson, a law professor. But the challenges he faces as a conservative at Berkeley involve not his colleagues but some of his students.

Formerly a lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice, Mr. Yoo co-wrote a memo in January 2002 arguing that the United States did not have to comply with the Geneva Convention in its treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Mr. Yoo's role in that memo became public last spring. During the law school's commencement, in May, about a quarter of the graduates wore red armbands to protest his views and called for his resignation.

"Berkeley students love to protest," says Mr. Yoo, who did not attend the commencement. He says he has no problem with the students' expressing their views, but finds them "extremely confused" about what free speech is if they would go so far as to call on him to quit simply for expressing conservative opinions about the law.

Mr. Yoo says he is the lone conservative on Berkeley's law faculty. He also says a number of his colleagues have told him that while they disagree with him politically, they were disappointed in the students' behavior.

But students, he says, "will criticize the things I say because they think they're too conservative." He says that on course evaluations they will write comments like "I don't like taking a course from a conservative professor" or "I don't think a conservative professor should be teaching us constitutional law."

Pamela Bachilla, president of the Cal Berkeley Democrats, says students are free to voice such displeasure. "If students don't agree with what he's teaching or don't agree with what he thinks, it's their right not to," she says.

Still, says Mr. Yoo, conservative professors at the university have to work harder to get a fair shake from students and "be as neutral as possible" in the classroom because students are always ready to accuse them of indoctrination. Liberal professors, he contends, don't face such suspicions.

Nonetheless, some observers note that conservative professors get plenty of support from increasingly powerful conservative student groups. About a dozen national organizations -- among the largest are Young America's Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Leadership Institute -- spend some $38-million annually pushing their agendas by bringing speakers to colleges and financing conservative student publications, says Ben Hubbard, campus-programs director for the Center for American Progress. The center is a liberal think tank in Washington led by John D. Podesta, who was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton.

"The student organizations, because they're so well-funded and so well-organized, are able to assert a very loud voice on campus and really set the agenda," says Mr. Hubbard. "By doing that, they're able to come to the aid of conservative professors" and serve as a "built-in megaphone" for whatever grievances they may have.

A Tenure Case

Like Mr. Natelson, James D. Miller, an economics professor at Smith, had a conflict with his colleagues. His concerned tenure.

Hired as an assistant professor in 1996, Mr. Miller was reappointed in April 2000. Over the next couple of years he published five academic articles and a book, Game Theory at Work (McGraw-Hill, 2003). But he also wrote about a dozen conservative editorials in mainstream publications. Those opinion articles, he asserts, set other professors in his department against him. When he came up for tenure, in 2002, they voted against him.

The senior professors in the department who voted on Mr. Miller's tenure also wrote letters to Smith's president explaining their votes, a common practice at the college. One wrote that Mr. Miller had publicly criticized academe in his book. Another, he says, wrote that she was "disturbed" by the views he expressed in a National Review Online article about why college professors are unpatriotic.

Professors at Smith were "so used to trashing conservatives, they didn't at all censor themselves," says Mr. Miller, who appealed the decision.

The college's grievance committee ruled in his favor, finding that the two economics professors, whom Mr. Miller declines to name, had violated his academic freedom. The committee allowed him to come up for tenure again. His department then voted against him a second time. But last May the campuswide tenure-and-promotion committee overruled the department and recommended to the Board of Trustees that Mr. Miller be granted tenure. The board agreed, and he is now an associate professor.

Although he won his tenure fight, Mr. Miller must still face other, smaller battles over his views. He points to the empty space on a bulletin board near his office where he had posted a conservative political cartoon alongside liberal ones. After someone kept tearing it down, he tacked up a sign: "My name is Jim Miller and whoever keeps tearing this down is a coward."

The cartoon stayed up. Having made his point, he took it down a month later.

Social Outcasts

While tenure provides job security, it does not necessarily bestow a sense of belonging. Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group, attributes the growing feeling among conservative professors that they are unwelcome on campuses to changes in the humanities and social sciences, which he says have become more touchy-feely and less scholarly.

Professors who teach in those disciplines, he says, believe "that America is a society in need of systematic overhaul" -- and that it is their job to change it. That creates a climate where people who disagree are not just different but morally suspect, he says. If your colleagues knew what you believed, he says, they "would see you as a moral pariah."

As a result, says Mr. Balch, many conservatives who want to feel free to express their political opinions simply bypass academe and pursue careers in law, business, or journalism.

Those who do enter the professoriate have to watch what they say and whom they associate with, particularly before getting tenure, says Mr. Balch, who adds that professors often ask that mail from his association be sent to their homes rather than their offices. In the academy, "a lot of people who are conservative feel they live something of a double life," he says.

They also feel lonely. Mr. Natelson says professors at some law schools tell him that they have fewer problems where there are several faculty members who don't agree with the majority. But at Montana's law school "I'm alone, and that is a very bad situation," he says. "They can just decide it's open season on that one person. That's why it's so important that you have a balanced faculty."

Mr. Miller faces far less hostility at Smith. That is partly because members of academic departments there do not share offices in the same building. So economics professors don't see each other every day.

To celebrate his getting tenure, Mr. Miller's department chairman brought champagne and pâté to a faculty meeting. But the professor has avoided any contact with his two colleagues who wrote the critical letters.

Mr. Miller, who is running as a Republican for a State Senate seat in Massachusetts this fall, wants to make a larger point -- that the shortage of conservative professors shortchanges students.

"It's sort of as if the students are taught in an obscure language" and "not really exposed to views outside of a radical-leftist perspective," he says. "They've never heard an argument for why free trade might be good for poor people in Africa. They think the only reason people oppose affirmative action is because they don't like black people. They have no idea that there are other views out there. So much of the left is based on feeling, not reason."

At the University of Montana, Mr. Natelson says, conservative students have complained to him over the years that there is a lack of balance in the teaching of constitutional law there. One student, he says, told him that there was no discussion of the Second Amendment, which lays out the right to keep and bear arms.

The predominance of liberal professors "means that most students will not get the kind of education their parents would hope they get and will not be exposed to different sides of an issue," says Ms. Swain, a professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University.

If she is teaching a course on affirmative action, for example, she says she tries to balance the readings with liberal and conservative views. Many liberal professors, she asserts, assign only the readings of those who agree with them or invite only like-minded speakers to class.

While Ms. Swain tells students her opinion on the issue, "they don't have to accept my position to be evaluated fairly," she says.

The leftist tilt in academe, says Mr. McWhorter, dates to the 1960s, when a wave of scholar-activists began entering the professoriate. Since then, identifying with the left has come to represent not just a political persuasion but also "the mark of enlightenment," says the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. "It's assumed that if you're conservative you don't know your facts."

The Race Card

The stigma of being identified as conservative on campus is even greater for those who are black, some professors say.

"Once that label is leveled against an African-American or anyone who's a minority, it's very crippling," says Ms. Swain. "When people are hiring a white professor, for the most part there's a focus on scholarship, not what other constituent groups on campus will think." But when a university hires a black professor, she says, "it's how you're perceived."

Ms. Swain and Mr. McWhorter, both of whom are African-American, say that although they don't identify themselves as conservative, they are perceived as such because they hold conservative views on a few key issues. The inaccurate description has worked to Mr. McWhorter's advantage, he says, while Ms. Swain says it has hindered her career.

A former associate professor of linguistics at Berkeley who resigned last spring to pursue a career in political writing, Mr. McWhorter has enjoyed a measure of celebrity because he argued against the use of Ebonics -- an African-American variant of standard English -- in the classroom and because of his book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (Free Press, 2000), in which he argues against the use of racial preferences in college admissions.

"I'm news because it's considered so unusual for a black scholar in particular to have views that depart at all from the leftist orthodoxy," says Mr. McWhorter, a self-described independent whose positions on abortion rights (he supports it) and welfare (he says it should have a time limit) are less well known. "So the idea that you are a black professor who does not agree that black people who grow up affluent should be let into universities with low grades and test scores is considered big news."

Despite his professional success, he says, many black professors see him as a traitor, and tell their students he is a "handy object lesson in how not to think."

Such opprobrium has come from students as well. Mr. McWhorter remembers the time a few years ago when he walked through Berkeley's student center on his way to class and a young black man yelled out, "There goes the black man who doesn't like black people!"

Other students, though, would tell him they found it refreshing to hear a professor who was not repeating the same old mantra about racism at every turn or how all black people are poor.

'A Truth Seeker'

Ms. Swain believes that her political views have directly affected her academic career. When her first book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Harvard University Press) was published, in 1993, many African-Americans called her a sellout. She had questioned the wisdom of the drawing of black-majority Congressional districts, challenging the notion that only African-American lawmakers can best represent black people's interests.

Over the years she has taken positions against racial preferences and, like Mr. McWhorter, believes that affirmative action should be based on socioeconomic class, a view that has caused others to put her in the conservative camp even though she has never embraced that label. "I actually call myself a truth seeker," Ms. Swain says. "I call it the way I see it."

The way she sees it, government ought to do more for the poor, and a community-college education should be free. Those views, she says, do not make her conservative.

Even so, since being labeled as such, Ms. Swain says, she has found it more difficult to get grants and fellowships. On one occasion, she says, a member of a grant committee told her that another member had blocked her award because of her conservative views on affirmative action.

And when she applied for a job at an elite California college in the early 1990s, she says, black students and liberal white professors organized against her appointment. The institution, which Ms. Swain declines to name, had never had a tenured black professor, she says: "I was told that one of the black students said they couldn't afford for the first one to be me."

The Long View

Conservative professors won't meet with approval anytime soon, says Mr. McWhorter. "What you need," he says, "is a shift in the culture, when the conventional wisdom of the U.S. shifts back to what was called liberal in 1960 as opposed to what is called liberal today. Then academic culture will change."

Shifts in some professional fields have already begun, he says. Look at journalism. "Notice some of the people writing on the New York Times op-ed page," he says, such as David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard who is conservative. And The Atlantic Monthly now leans toward the center and often runs articles by the conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke.

"Conservative voices are getting out there and showing that they're not crazy," Mr. McWhorter says.

Still, he expects higher education to be the last bastion of liberalism. Academe "is the most resistant of anybody in America in thinking in new ways because academics tend to suppose that they have learning on their side," he says.

Mr. Balch agrees. "There probably has to be more external effort made than is presently being made to keep intellectuals honest, to preserve more genuine intellectual pluralism in academic life," he says. Those efforts, he adds, should come from officials like presidents, provosts, and boards of trustees.

But some longtime administrators, who do acknowledge a shortage of conservative professors, express no sense of urgency to fix it. "I don't think it's a huge problem," says Alan Brinkley, provost of Columbia University, who says he is very much a liberal. "I don't think we should be aspiring to 50-50, but I think it would be better for the academy if there were a greater representation of conservative views."

While it is fine for people to exhort colleges to hire more conservatives, he says, "the idea of creating formal policies to effect this is a very dangerous idea. Academic freedom really depends on the ability of academics to govern their own institutions."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a liberal law professor at Duke University, says: "At a time when the president is conservative, the Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative majority, when both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, it's hard to see this as a time of liberal dominance."

Conservative professors "make themselves seem like an embattled minority," Mr. Chemerinsky says, "but it's not the case." They do so "because we're all more sympathetic for the underdog."

Conservative professors say they want equal treatment, not sympathy. And although he won his tenure case, Mr. Miller contends that his conservative colleagues in the humanities and social sciences won't get it anytime soon.

He advises conservative graduate students in those disciplines to think twice before pursuing an academic career. "If you're going to be a college professor and you want to write conservative articles," he says, "there's a very good chance, no matter how good you are, that you'll have to leave academia."

[rick]

My Apology to UNC-Wilmington
By Mike S. Adams
Monday, October 23, 2006

Until just recently, the UNCW administration was trying to deprive me of both a) my right to appeal their decision to deny my promotion to full professor and, b) my right to a written explanation of that decision. Now, the leader of our local communist dictatorship has given me a written explanation although I am told by university officials that I have no right to use it in an appeal. In fact, here at UNC-We Hate Due Process, I can’t appeal the decision with any documents at all. There is no appellate process whatsoever.

Given that I have won several teaching awards and wildly exceeded the average productivity of my colleagues – even in refereed or “scholarly” journal publications - it was assumed by most observers that my denial would be explained on the grounds of “collegiality,” or lack thereof.

Those observers were wrong. According to the written explanation I have now received, I am deficient in all areas; teaching, research, and service.

As I sat back in my office – with my 1998 UNCW Professor of the Year Award hanging just to my left and my 2000 Faculty Member of the Year Award hanging just to my right – I read carefully the portion of the letter saying my teaching “does not satisfy the standard” of promotion to full professor. By the time I finished the letter, I was struck by an awesome realization:

THE POWERS THAT BE AT UNCW ARE PUNISHING ME FOR MY PUBLIC CRITICISM OF THE UNCW DIVERSITY MOVEMENT.

Given this new revelation, I have decided to conduct myself in a manner more consistent with the character of my colleagues and my so-called superiors. Specifically, I have decided to imitate and perhaps even surpass my colleagues in two crucial areas required for promotion to full professor: 1) Individual Cowardice, and 2) Intellectual Dishonesty.

In order to accomplish the first of these two goals, I hereby offer the following apology to my colleagues at UNCW: I am sorry for criticizing the UNCW diversity movement. I really mean that.

In order to accomplish the second goal - of matching the near-total intellectual dishonesty of my colleagues - I am going to demonstrate the sincerity of my apology by focusing only on the positive aspects of the diversity movement.

Today, I begin my new career as a diversity proponent by telling you three stories – each one about a different UNCW student whose life was forever changed by the diversity movement at UNCW.

The first story is of Ashley (not real name) – a girl I met the other day in the parking lot by the Cameron School of Business. When I first saw her, she was making out with her boyfriend in his Chevy Blazer right in front of the entrance to the parking lot. I waited until the line of cars behind me was eight deep before I even thought about tapping the horn lightly to let the young couple know they were holding up cars waiting to get in the rapidly filling lot.

Just before I hit the horn, she got out of the Blazer and started to walk away. After three steps, though, she decided to return to the Blazer for one last kiss. That’s when I tapped the horn as lightly as possible to let her know there were other people in the world besides her and her boyfriend.

But, apparently, Ashley didn’t like that little tap on the horn. After she slammed the door of the Blazer she shot me the middle finger and shouted “f—k you!” at the top of her lungs. But she wasn’t through. After taking a few steps, she stopped, turned around, and flipped me the bird again shouting “f—k you!” as loud as she could.

So, naturally, I did what any white heterosexual Christian male would do under the circumstances. I kept a close eye on her, parked as fast as possible, and chased her down before she got inside the Cameron School of Business. When I caught up to her, I thanked her for her contribution to diversity at UNCW. The cultural norms regarding consideration of others and use of profanity and crude hand gestures in public are all antiquated norms developed by an oppressive white Christian patriarchy. By rebelling against them, she was showing us that each individual must carve out her own way of doing things, regardless of the tradition of the dominant culture.

The same thing can be said of Eric (not real name). I kicked Eric out of one of my classes the other day for bring a cell phone into a test. He ran down to the office to put the cell phone on the secretary’s desk in our main office and then ran back to get seated before I passed out the exam. But, unfortunately, after the test was over Eric found out his cell phone had been accidentally locked in the secretary’s filing cabinet. That’s when Eric showed us that he has a unique perspective on the laws of trespassing and intentional destruction of personal property.

Without hesitation, Eric began pulling on the file cabinet door in an effort to break the lock and recapture his cell phone. He knows that the laws he was breaking were written by white Christian men who probably owned slaves. Not only that but he was ten minutes overdue to call his girlfriend. If he didn’t call her soon, he knew he wouldn’t get any action later on that night. Eric likes to fornicate outside the confines of marriage in order to contribute to the diversity movement’s emphasis on sexual freedom. Since he’s white and he isn’t gay, his ability to celebrate diversity is somewhat limited.

And, finally, there is Chastity (definitely not real name). She came to UNCW last year as a very conservative Christian girl from a rural area. But, this year, her life has taken a different turn. My wife ran across her profile on the internet and found pictures of her smoking pot out of a water bong. She had also posted comments (in chat rooms) littered with the f-word and every other imaginable form of profanity. And she posted pictures of herself – always holding a beer bottle or a shot glass – with her breasts falling out of her shirt.

After just one year at UNCW this nice conservative Christian girl has turned into a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed, drunken slut. And that’s cause for celebration at the Diversity Office where kids are encouraged to discard their parents’ values in exchange for the philosophy of moral relativism.

So those of you who thought I was incapable of saying anything nice about the diversity movement were clearly wrong. When I speak at The University of Minnesota-Morris this Thursday night - October 26th at 7 p.m., free and open to the public! - I’ll do the same thing for the feminist movement. Can anyone loan me a bullet-proof vest?



Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel: Confessions of a Conservative College Professor.

[valpotentate]

There is no rebuttal for a lack of logic. But I forgot that you don't actually discuss things on the board, you just act as an article generator. Oh well, back to basketball!

[rick]

Mis-characterizing what someone writes is hardly a critical analysis. And then trying to force a nicely wrapped up but phony syllogistic rebuttal based on that mis-characterization is commonly referred to as a straw-man argument. That's all you provided. Hardly a scholarly endeavor. Give your reply to an English instructor who teaches logic and critical analysis and critical thinking and I'll bet you get your "rebuttal" thrown back in your face with either an "F" or you will be told to go back and rewrite it and put some real work into it this time.

How's that for discussion?

[valpotentate]

Good discussion. But you and I both know that that article contains roughly five straw men of its own (or should we say straw people in the interest of diversity?). The article also utilizes the arguments of the package deal, false dilemma, misleading vividness, hasty generalization, half-truth, and biased sample. In fact, had you tried to find an article that used more improper forms of debate I bet you couldn't have done it. Now could I put together a cogent, "A" paper rebuttal of this article, elaborating on its use of each of these logical fallacies? Of course, but why should I when you'll probably just post five more articles tomorrow? You'll wear me out, buddy!

[rick]

I'm impressed. But you still missed the point of the article. It was actually well written and right on target. But since you came to the article with your own preconceived ideas about diversity programs in universities, your argument was lame and I doubt that you could "put together a cogent, "A" paper" of your own.

I suppose the first couple of paragraphs raised the hair on your back - even the title itself - and you reacted with typical liberal knee-jerking under the table. That was what you were doing under the table wasn't it?

Even someone who, unlike yourself, would have come to the article attempting to understand what the author's thesis was would have begun, in the first paragraph or so, to realize that the purpose of diversity for diversity's sake is probably not what a university's mission should be. Things like the pursuit of truth, beauty, and what is good might be something worthwhile in a mission statement of a university. And the author goes on to show shortly thereafter that the true reason most universities who pursue diversity for its own sake is to end up really pursuing a subtle form of racism. Because true "diversity" of course would mean celebrating diversity not only of different races and cultures, but more important, diversity of ideas, something that is not tolerated in many universities as is evidenced by the views from conservative faculty members, who are in the minority.(Perhaps they should file a discrimination suit?) In fact, diversity of culture and race(the kind peddled by guilty white liberals), especially when it is forced upon others with differing views, including the black man that wrote this article, does not unite anyone - it divides.

What we should celebrate is not what divides us but what unites us. "Diversity" in the sense universities mean it pits one race or group against another. We should learn to appreciate and respect people not because they are black or red or yellow or white, but because they are made by a creator, who commands us to love Him with all of our MIND, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our union with the Creator is what unties all of us. Our God-given talents that we use to help one another is what makes us diverse, not our race or our politics. The purpose of a university should not be to correct perceived past wrongs to the advantage of a particular "group of the century" minority. As the author pointed out in the first paragraph, it wouldn't make much sense for a company like Microsoft to start making shoes just so that it can be diverse in its mission, diverse for diversity's sake. In the same way, universities who obsequiously do their darndest to pick up the torch to lead the university toward being diverse, just to be diverse, is just plain stupid. No beauty, good, or truth comes from it. And the students don't really learn anything. And I wouldn't want my kids being taught that crap and if I found out they were being taught that crap, I would stop donating my money to the university until they stopped the nonsense, just as I would stop investing in Microsoft if they decided to get into the shoe business just to be diverse.

As you referred to your logic 101 notes to try to impress me that you knew about logic, you only served to further reveal the bias and ignorance you have and that you brought to this topic when you tried to respond with your straw-man arguments.

By the way, you did ask me why I thought it was true that 73% of universities have liberal faculty members. And I provided you several studies and proof of why I believe that to be true. That's called and informed opinion. Why do you have problems with being provided solid documentation? You would have been happier if I just said that was my opinion and that's good enough? You amaze me.

[valpotentate]

Some good points are raised there and I'd be glad to discuss it next week if you'd be interested. No time right now. Table it until then or drop it? Up to you.