Academic Intolerance: A Progressive Speaks Out
The academic year now closing has seen more than its normal share of student, professorial, and administrative moral posturing, so much so that we’re seeing signs of a healthy backlash. Two recent invitations came to me to speak on the subject, for example, one on academic freedom, the other more broadly on tolerance. And very recently we’ve seen that the campus protests over naming the George Mason University Law School after the late Justice Antonin Scalia were just settled after Virginia’s State Council of Higher Education declined to block the name change.
But don’t think the battle against leftist academic intolerance has been won. Witness Nicholas Kristof’s op‐ed in today’s New York Times, “The Liberal Blind Spot.” In a column a few weeks ago, Kristof offered “a confession of liberal intolerance” in which he criticized his fellow progressives for their hypocrisy in promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses—except ideological. The reader reaction?
It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.
“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow‐minded and are sure they have the right answers.”
NYT readers aside, how skewed are the numbers in academia? Well at Princeton during the 2012 presidential election, 157 faculty and staff donated to Barack Obama’s campaign, 2 to Mitt Romney’s—a visiting engineering professor and a janitor. From 2011 to 2014 at Cornell, 96 percent of the funds the faculty donated to political candidates or parties went to Democratic campaigns; only 15 of 323 donors gave to conservative causes— perhaps a product of Cornell’s agricultural school. And that same ratio, 96 percent, describes the contributions of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to Democratic candidates during that same period. For a broad picture of the ideological complexion of American law schools, see the splendid article by Northwestern University Law School’s Jim Lindgren in the 2016 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, published by the law school’s Federalist Society chapter.
Numbers that skewed don’t come about by accident. As Kristof notes, “When a survey finds that more than half of academics in some fields would discriminate against a job seeker who they learned was an evangelical, that feels to me like bigotry.” Fortunately, a noted progressive has had the courage to call this for what it is. Kristof’s piece is worth reading.
