A while back, I wrote a piece on the educational establishment's response to the surveys of faculty partisan breakdown, arguing that these responses, much more than the partisan numbers themselves, made the case for those concerned about the current lack of intellectual diversity on campus.

John Tierney appears to have noticed the same thing. Earlier this week, he published an op-ed on the ideological imbalance among faculty at j-schools and law schools. As my colleague Tim Burke pointed out, the article was probably not the most well-reasoned critique of the tenure system, but it nonetheless seems to have provoked a furious reaction from defenders of the status quo. According to Tierney's column this morning (shielded behind the Times firewall), these responses broke down into four categories:

1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.

2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.

3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.

4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

As Tierney notes, such responses don't"shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus."

Tierney makes two additional important points. First, he quotes Mark Bauerlein, who notes,"The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing. It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself." We've certainly seen an example of this pattern in the reconfiguration of History staffing as well. Secondly, Tierney persuasively notes that the radicalization of the academy has probably benefitted conservatives politically, since liberals can no longer call on academics for realistic public policy alternatives.

Robert KC Johnson - 10/15/2005

I agree that he sidestepped the faultiness of the crony analysis entirely, but his points on the Leftist arguments as to why "conservatives" are unfit for the academy are consistent with what we've been seeing over the last couple of years.

Can't say on the Bauerlein b/c I don't know the situation in English. But I can think of a lot of History research projects that, while not necessarily being shelved under pressure from an advisor, would be unlikely to yield someone a job.

Timothy James Burke - 10/15/2005

I thought this was a stronger piece than the first one that Tierney wrote on the subject, but I suppose that would be my mild frustration: that he cherrypicked the criticisms levelled at that piece so as to ignore what struck me as legitimate objections to the comparisons it offered.

I also am not sure I agree with Bauerlein's assessment of research projects that would be inevitably shelved.