Vocaboly.com

[Abe Kohen]

Fear and Loathing

By JOHN J. MILLER

The anonymous posters began to speckle the campus of St. Lawrence University
in upstate New York last month. They carried an eye-grabbing message --
"Republicans: The Other White Meat."

Elizabeth Wardell, a senior, thought she knew who was responsible for their
appearance: a certain assistant professor with the reputation of a
provocateur. Surfing around her school's Web site, she landed on the
sociology department's homepage and read a paragraph about Robert J. Torres.
Then she clicked on his name and was transported to his personal blog.
There, Ms. Wardell -- who is president of the local College Republicans --
discovered an entry headlined "Fascist, Racist College Republicans."

Politics on the Internet can be a nasty business, but what Mr. Torres spewed
forth was unusually obnoxious. His condemnation of the Grand Old Party's
youngest members was angrier than a Howard Dean hissy fit and cruder than
John Kerry's potty-mouthed interview with Rolling Stone. The professor
denounced everything from "the Saddam s---" (the liberation of Iraq) to
"economic policies that favor rich, white f---s" (tax cuts).

"I couldn't believe that one of our professors would write such hateful
things," says Ms. Wardell.

Mr. Torres insists that browbeating College Republicans is just a hobby he
pursues in his spare time. "What I do on my blog is personal," he says. The
administration at St. Lawrence University seems to agree, or not to care. It
says it won't remove the link from its official Web site to Mr. Torres's
private one, despite requests from Ms. Wardell and others.

Perhaps this is a good thing. Right-leaning students intrigued by one of Mr.
Torres's course descriptions can find out what their prospective teacher
really thinks of them before they make the mistake of enrolling in his
class. But there is a larger matter to consider: Why do so many professors
loathe Republicans?

The simplest explanation may be that it's easiest to hate your enemies when
you don't know them. After all, assistant professors like Mr. Torres have
very little opportunity to mingle with card-carrying members of the Party of
Lincoln, or with non-card-carrying conservatives, in their faculty lounges.
Call it a crisis of diversity -- not of the racial or ethnic sort but of the
intellectual variety.

Eighteen months ago, American Enterprise magazine studied voter-registration
rolls and published a survey of professors and their political preferences.
At Stanford University, 151 professors were aligned with parties of the left
(e.g., Democrats, Greens) and 17 were affiliated with parties of the right
(Republicans, Libertarians). Similar disparities were recorded everywhere
researchers looked: Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Penn State, UCLA, etc. A
separate review of Ivy League academics found that 84% of them voted for Al
Gore in the 2000 presidential election, compared with 9% for George W. Bush
and 6% for Ralph Nader.

Apparently the term liberal arts is just another way of saying conservatives
need not apply. At Duke University -- where Democratic deans and humanities
professors outnumber Republican ones by a factor of 18 -- the chairman of
the philosophy department recently offered his unvarnished views on the
subject. "We try to hire the best, smartest people available," said Robert
Brandon. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally
conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire."

A philosophy professor may be forgiven for not realizing that the typical
Republican is actually a little better educated than the typical Democrat,
according to a social survey administered by the University of Chicago. Yet
he really ought to know that Mill's barb was aimed at a 19th-century British
political party rather than a beleaguered minority of 21st-century American
academics.

Imagine if Mr. Brandon had used a similar logic to explain why blacks are
underrepresented among Duke's students and faculty. The administration would
have issued a gushing apology for the philosopher's hate speech. As penance,
it might have offered Jean-Bertrand Aristide an endowed chair in the
political-science department.

People of the right enjoy no such coddling. To borrow a lit-crit term
applied to the alleged victims of white-male hegemony, campus conservatives
are "The Other" -- a barely human subpopulation whose presumed inferiorities
justify the dominance of an enlightened professoriate.

The ivory-tower crowd generally defends itself from charges of bias in one
of two ways. There is the Torres approach: "Despite my grievances with the
right, I work hard to treat people equally in my work as a matter of
principle and a commitment to social justice." In other words, a deep-seated
antipathy for College Republicans and other fascists doesn't influence how
these students are taught. ("Not true," says Ms. Wardell. "My friends and I
often pretend to be more liberal because we know it leads to better
grades.")

Then there is the suggestion that politics are irrelevant: e.g., that an
admiration for Dennis Kucinich has nothing to do with teaching calculus or
Chaucer.

Both theories sound plausible. But haven't liberals been telling us for
years that the personal is political and ideology is everywhere? My own
experience suggests that the liberals may have a point -- and that their
prejudices can't be checked at the schoolhouse door. To take a single
example: About 15 years ago I endured a psychology course at the University
of Michigan. One of the lectures focused on racism. My professor announced
that it takes several forms, starting with the KKK variety. She said another
strain is called "symbolic racism," which involves opposition to government
programs meant to improve the status of blacks and Hispanics. So if you
think racial-preference policies aren't a great idea, you're a "symbolic
racist."

Today this is basically the official position of the American Psychological
Association. Students who question it can't win, because speaking up is an
admission of guilt. Call me a stupid conservative -- or worse -- for
suspecting that the whole thing has more to do with politics than pedagogy.

So what might be done, apart from packing professors into sensitivity
seminars? Conservative gadfly David Horowitz has written an Academic Bill of
Rights that promotes intellectual diversity and protects students from
political harassment. In his energetic way, he is urging legislative bodies
from student assemblies to Congress to adopt it.

The American Association of University Professors has already announced its
opposition to Mr. Horowitz's proposal. No surprise there. The last thing it
wants is a new generation of students informed of the fact that they can't
believe everything their professors say -- even the ones who aren't cussing
on the Web.

Mr. Miller is a writer for National Review.

Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

[KSG]

"Abe Kohen" <akohen@xenon.stanford.edu> wrote in message news:<c30bd7$22kcnt$1@ID-102750.news.uni-berlin.de>...