Does anybody know of a single Black Studies program in the entire country that is NOT headed by a black of any nationality? (I chose not to use the PC term African American intentionally here, because some departments are actually headed by black foreigners)

In fact, Mr. Peterson said it’s not imperative that the new professor of conservative thought be an actual conservative.

“We hire lots of scholars of the French language,” he says, “and they aren’t necessarily French.”

Ahhhh. So, they are okay with a liberal’s take on conservatism. Isn’t that what students at CU and the like already get?

Would you give someone who didn’t respect the tenure system tenure? I mean, his view of tenure is that if he gets it he won’t have to do any work. If he disrespects academia so much, why’s he whining about it? He’s just borrowing from the stereotypical liberal playbook. He gave a pretty legitimate reason not to hire him, and is now whining that he’s discriminated against.

Thank you, but yes, I did read it, and several other articles at the time on the issue.

Is “respecting the tenure system” a requirement for getting it, or worse, a reason for denying it? At best, the criticism should have been limited to “well, if it is so bad, they why do you want it?” In reality, this criticism of Miller was merely a convenient cover for the real indignation: that he would criticize the liberal infestation of that department at Smith.

I have worked (and still do, currently) at several of these western MA universities/colleges and know whereof I speak. Conservatives learn to keep their heads down. You stay off the radar, because the liberals outnumber you and will turn on you. You find the like-minded eventually, but they all agree: smile and nod whenever the topic of politics comes up. They attack Bush, you smile and nod. They attack the war, you smile and nod. Etc., etc. Otherwise, you are ostracized, either overtly or subtly, but ostracized nonetheless. Miller should have known this, but felt his academic achievements would overcome the bias. It almost did not. It would have been much easier to keep his head down and suck it up until he got tenure.

I think we can all agree that in the case of an admitted conservative on these types of campuses, tenure is a shield against the kind of liberal attacks that are becoming all too common, and a way to preserve his right to criticize what he likes.

In many ways, tenure does preserve the careers of “deadwood” profs, but in the case of conservatives, it truly does allow free speech and thought to survive on campus. It is just that the process of getting there requires the exact opposite: you have to toe the line, be PC, and hide your true beliefs. That is NOT what college is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about the free exchange of ideas, debate, research and drawing conclusions from all of the above.

Liberals have squashed that premise. Be a conservative, get your car keyed or worse. It is suppression of free speech that many, nay most, of the students don’t get to see. They get constantly bombarded by liberal “thought” and eventually succumb to a form of Stockholm syndrome.

Come out here to what I like to call “Berkeley East” and see what I am talking about. Come to the land of Professor Jennie Traschen (physics) and UMASS graduate Rene Gonzalez. The former had the bad timing to call the American Flag a “the flag stands for is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and repression” to the Amherst Board of Selectmen to keep the flag from being flown in the town, on (you guessed it) 9/10/01, and the latter called fallen soldier Pat Tillman a “G.I. Joe guy who got what was coming to him.” “That was not heroism,” Gonzalez wrote. “It was prophetic idiocy.”

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Welcome to my world, jroberts. Go to grad school. Be a postdoc. Work in the liberal universities as I have, then tell me that I am crazy.

When the phone don’t ring, it’ll be you.

Sophomore Marissa Malouff sees the campus as a sort of re-education camp. Sheltered rich kids from out-of-state might come for the snowboarding, but while they’re here they get dunked in a simmering pot of left-wing idealism. And that, in her view, is how it should be.

Scary. Though it might make a good slogan: “UC-Boulder: Come for the Snowboarding. Stay for the brainwashing.”

On May 13th, 2008 at 11:24 am, tre said:

I’m a college graduate,too. I thought the purpose of college was to teach a student a trade, not to learn all that’s wrong with the world.

No, that’s the purpose of trade school. In college you learn how to think, and that includes being challenged with ideas that you don’t agree with.

Look, most students enter college as conservatives. And most of these students exit college as conservatives. If these liberal professors were “reeducating” their students, and not educating, then you would think that more students would leave as liberals. I graduated just a year ago, and even though a lot of people I knew became more liberal relative to how they started out, I hardly knew anyone who changed from being a conservative to a liberal, and the number of people who did change from conservative to liberal is a small proportion of the number of conservatives who just became more staunchly conservative, and a handful became very loud and obnoxious pricks about it. (A handful of the liberals become pricks too. I think they were slightly more numerous but less than half as loud). This whole fear of brain-washing is total nonsense. If conservative thought collapses the minute a formerly conservative person is reminded that not everyone gets rich under capitalism, then maybe the problem is the argument conservatives are making in the first place.

Dimsdale, did you read the link you provided?

In my book, “Game Theory at Work,” I said that tenure, which is a lifetime job guarantee, sometimes attracts people who don’t really want to work very hard for the rest of their lives, and this person was very upset that I would criticize academia in a public way.

Would you give someone who didn’t respect the tenure system tenure? I mean, his view of tenure is that if he gets it he won’t have to do any work. If he disrespects academia so much, why’s he whining about it? He’s just borrowing from the stereotypical liberal playbook. He gave a pretty legitimate reason not to hire him, and is now whining that he’s discriminated against.

Don’t get me wrong. I think a lot of liberal academia is ridiculous. But whining about and taking a reactionary stance on every issue just further entrenches liberal academia. There’s a lot that academics of different parties can talk about other than politics. If conservatives want to conservativize academia, they should try being academics first instead of whining about everything.

How liberal is the University of Colorado at Boulder?

The campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners..

C’mon. whats wrong with vegetarian food? Its not tofu’s fault if its liked by liberal nuts. Secondly, I am sure the tofu based food is present to serve (and capture market) many international students – lot of Indian students (legal, not illegal) are vegetarians. It has nothing to do with how liberal the university itself is.

The Republican party has left academia. As they’ve become the party of voodoo economics. If there are fewer Republican professors, it’s more a result of Nixon and the Reagan revolution than changes within the university.

Baloney. I worked with guys on Wall St. who are 5x more competent than the average math teacher, and who also had real world experience. Some of them were turned away from the NYC Department of Education in their hopes of going into NYC classrooms and teaching students real math and business courses.

The Department of Ed. said that these dedicated heroes didn’t have the requisite coursework in “teaching self-esteem” and “gym class.”

US education is a liberal protected monopoly and you know it. If quotas were established for a certain representation of “conservative” professors, you would go ape poo poo.

On May 13th, 2008 at 12:04 pm, lgm said:
The Republican party has left academia. As they’ve become the party of voodoo economics. If there are fewer Republican professors, it’s more a result of Nixon and the Reagan revolution than changes within the university.

Is that because those who can, do, and those who can’t, become miserable little whiners “teaching” at universities how evil, racist Republicans are the devil?