Sunday, 28 November 2004

Academic diversity

George Will has a good piece on the leftward tilt of academia:

Academics such as the next secretary of state still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations—except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome.

They do indeed cultivate diversity—in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

I wonder if the increased leftward tilt of academia after the sixties helps explain the rise of think tanks such as Cato? Seems plausible.

1 comment:

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Or, might the rise of conservative think tanks help explain the leftward tilt of academia, as conservative scholars have been drawn to alternate employment?

When I see pieces like this one from Will, I have to wonder what solution is being proposed to the problem. Surely political “affirmative action” in academia would be far more noxious than the racial and gender preferences that almost all conservatives oppose. (And which, for the record, I myself oppose.)

And in absence of a proposed solution, pieces like Will’s amount to nothing more than conservative kvetching.

 
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