Affirmative Action for Dummies

[Chris Alger]

I wish this were the title of an orange-colored book but according to today’s NY Times it’s apparently it’s a nascent movement with growing political support. I’m all for affirmative action to rectify unfair discrimination. I would think, however, that one’s capacity for intelligent, informed and creative thinking usually relates to merit and one’s worthiness for a particular position.

I suppose there’s an argument that the slow witted deserve more of a break in those fields where intelligence matters less, like ditch-digging or professional wrestling. Alarmingly, however, the chief focus of this movement is the nation’s universities. I’m not joking: there are people out who wish to force colleges to hire a larger proportion of the demonstrably stupid on the grounds that university hiring, particularly for tenured professorships, are unfairly biased toward the knowledgeable and smart.

Unsurprisingly, this movement is spearheaded by on of the country’s more prominent dumb guys, David Horowitz. How dumb? According to a full-page ad Howoritz took out condemning reparations for slavery, “There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery.” (Substitute “murder” or “jaywalking” for “slavery” and think about it for just a second). Indeed, pick anything he’s written, such as a random sample from his column of one year ago today: “The Al Samoud missiles, the stashes of chemical uniforms, the seriousness with which allied commanders are taking the threat of chemical attacks on our troops are the sickening signs of how incompetent the Blix operation to disarm Saddam was.” During the 1980's, Horowitz thought one of the smartest things the U.S. could do was to give tons of money, weapons and training to fundamentalist mujahideen in Afghanistan. (For fuller treatments of Horowitz’s record see http://www.mediatransparency.org/peo...d_horowitz.htm and http://www.horowitzwatch.blogspot.com).

Anyway, here’s the article from the Times, omitting only the filler first paragraph:
____________________________________

Taking the Liberalism Out of Liberal Arts, NY Times, 4/4/04

Mr. Horowitz, author of “Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey” (Spence Publishing, 2003) and the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, is spearheading a campaign to end what he calls discrimination against conservative faculty and students. At its core is an “academic bill of rights,” written by Mr. Horowitz, that asks universities, among other things, to include both conservative and liberal viewpoints in their selection of campus speakers and syllabuses for courses and to choose faculty members “with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.”

The campaign, which is resurrecting the disputes that characterized the culture wars’ first wave in the 1980's, has caught the attention of Republican legislators and conservative student groups, much to the chagrin of many university administrators and faculty members. On March 23 the Georgia Senate passed a nonbinding resolution almost identical to the bill of rights drawn up by Mr. Horowitz, who had flown in to testify before the senators on liberal bias. In mid-March a similar bill was withdrawn from the Colorado legislature after the presidents of four universities, including the University of Colorado, agreed to publicize their grievance policies on campus and pledged to make their institutions open to all political viewpoints.

Meanwhile, Jack Kingston, a Republican congressman from Georgia, has introduced Mr. Horowitz’s bill as a nonbinding resolution in the House of Representatives. “We are only trying to get their attention,” Mr. Horowitz said, referring to university administrations. He said he was turning to legislative lobbying only as a last resort, after having waited unsuccessfully for a year for the State University of New York to adopt his bill of rights. “I am using the legislative resolutions as an inducement to have universities look into this. I have no intention of going to Congress to impose a politically correct faculty on a university.”

“Some people have no problem to have the government come in to meddle on the basis of skin color,” he added. The bill, he says, is based on the tradition of academic freedom, but many scholars argue that the legislative approach adopted by him and his followers could erode the very freedom the bill champions.

Although several Congressional aides said Mr. Horowitz’s bill of rights had little chance of passing, the American Association of University Professors, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that first codified principles of academic freedom in 1940, has posted a rebuttal to the bill on its Web site, www.aaup.org.

“The danger of such guidelines is that they invite diversity to be measured by political standards that diverge from the academic criteria of the scholarly profession,” the statement says. It also argues, for example, that “no department of political theory ought to be obligated to establish `a plurality of methodologies and perspectives’ by appointing a professor of Nazi political philosophy, if that philosophy is not deemed a reasonable scholarly option within the discipline of political theory.”

At the heart of the dispute is whether the kind of bias cited by Mr. Horowitz — the discrimination against scholars with right-leaning views in hiring and promotion and the stifling of conservative student opinions — is indeed prevalent.

Last year the Center for the Study of Popular Culture surveyed the political opinions of professors in the humanities and social sciences at 32 top universities and concluded that Democratic views vastly outnumbered Republican ones at each of them. To many of Mr. Horowitz’s supporters, that is strong evidence.

“We have 60 members in the department of government,” said Harvey Mansfield, a well-known Harvard professor. “Maybe three are Republicans. How could that be just by chance? How could that be fair? How could it be that the smartest people are all liberals? Many liberals simply don’t care for the kind of work conservatives do.”

Many academics interviewed for this article who described themselves as Democrats acknowledged that college faculties were dominated by liberals, partly as a result of leftist activists’ entering academia in the 1960's. The question, which has been roiling for nearly two decades now, is whether that has meant a smothering of conservative views.

Stanley Fish, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, fumed at the suggestion that a liberal conspiracy existed among faculty. “I have interviewed 250 job candidates in the last five years,” he said. “There is no room at all, in the hiring process, which is heavily scripted, for revealing political and religious orientation.”
The question you should ask professors,” he said, “is whether your work has influence or relevance.”

“A public resolution that is on the record has its own coercive force,” added Mr. Fish, whose work on postmodernism as an English professor has long drawn the ire of conservatives. “It can lead faculty members and students to feel that they are under surveillance.” Mary Burgan, the general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, said that universities already had guidelines against any kind of discrimination — including political — and that each year the organization itself looked into 6 to 10 accusations of bias, including ones made by conservatives.

Students for Academic Freedom, a campus organization working closely with Mr. Horowitz, has a Web site, studentsforacademicfreedom.org, where students can report incidents of discrimination. In 2001 Mr. Horowitz led a campaign to place advertisements in college newspapers denouncing calls for slavery reparations to black Americans. At Brown University, where one of the ads ran, student protesters destroyed copies of The Brown Daily Herald and demanded it pay “reparations” by giving free advertising space to proponents of reparations. (The paper refused but expanded space for opinion articles the day after the incident.)

Mr. Horowitz spoke at Brown in October at the invitation of The Brown Spectator, a conservative magazine founded by Stephen Beale, a senior, and Christopher McAuliffe, a junior, who have asked the student council to pass the academic bill of rights. “We are trying to get the university to say on the record that we embrace intellectual diversity,” said Mr. Beale, the son of a theology professor from Massachusetts.

Mr. McAuliffe, a Florida native, said: “I have been assigned Marx four times at Brown. Adam Smith? Not even once.”

[Gamblor]

Your belief that someone must somehow be intellectually inferior in order to have conservative views, as well as your belief that right-wing opinion is not stifled on campus shows how far your holier-than-thou attitude is willing to distort your mind's eye.

Having spent a third of the last decade on the campus of an institution, known for its right-wing views, whose students recently voted to join a Communist Union of Students, I can most unequivocally say there is indeed a bias against all conservative thought on campus, especially in the Dominion of Canada.

And I am from a Socialist country.

[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]
“We have 60 members in the department of government,” said Harvey Mansfield, a well-known Harvard professor. “Maybe three are Republicans. How could that be just by chance? How could that be fair? How could it be that the smartest people are all liberals?

[/ QUOTE ]

I jest a bit here. I definitely don't think all of the smartest people are liberals. In fact, I've been very fortunate to know some very intelligent conservatives, which I feel has kept me from falling into the common liberal trap of assuming conservatives are either stupid, evil, or some combination of the two.

But it does raise an interesting point. Without a doubt, there is a liberal leaning in academia. But how could you really tell to what extent that represents some kind of institutional marginalization of conservatives? Perhaps most of the people doing the best work in a given field are liberals. Perhaps there is a high correlation between the intensive study of certain complex fields by smart people and the adoption of liberal beliefs. There is no reason to assume that these people would breakdown 50/50 between conservatives and liberals.

[Jimbo]

[ QUOTE ]
Perhaps there is a high correlation between the intensive study of certain complex fields by smart people and the adoption of liberal beliefs.

[/ QUOTE ]

The above line alone qualifies you for your own late night comedy show.

However unfortunately this line [ QUOTE ]
There is no reason to assume that these people would breakdown 50/50 between conservatives and liberals.


[/ QUOTE ] shows you are also doomed to poor ratings and failure.

Jimbo

[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]


Quote:
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Perhaps there is a high correlation between the intensive study of certain complex fields by smart people and the adoption of liberal beliefs.


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The above line alone qualifies you for your own late night comedy show.


[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, clearly that's not in the realm of possibility, only humor. Though I guess the legions of brilliant conservative molecular biologists and Shakespeare scholars who can't get an academic job because of their political beliefs wouldn't find it so funny. Tons of those guys exist, right?

[ QUOTE ]
shows you are also doomed to poor ratings

[/ QUOTE ]

Measured considerations based on personal observation of the subject at hand never go over so well do they? Better to stick with the audience-friendly and tried and true method of resorting to blanket generalizations and personal attacks.

[daryn]

yeah, affirmative action is bogus, but then again anyone with a working brain knows this already.

[ThaSaltCracka]

[ QUOTE ]
yeah, affirmative action is bogus, but then again anyone with a working brain knows this already.

[/ QUOTE ]
Not only is it bogus, but it is a crutch for many people. Not to mention that there is reverse racism going on as well. Affirmative action is just another extension of the welfare system in this country, which has been a huge failure IMO, and one which has been used and exploited.

The wave of affirmative action spreading across campuses in America is connected to the very liberal views that many students have. I also think there is very much a liberal bias on college campuses around America, however I don't think that colleges themselves are to blame for it. I think a lot of students are fresh out of their parents homes, thus they are able to experience many things they have never seen before. This may be new races, creeds, attitudes, whatnot, but I think being away from the only authority they have ever known opens them up. But in many ways I think these college students get a swift kick in the ass after school when the realize that the real world is much more serious then they thought. Now that they have to support themselves and in some cases a family, their views change/evolve.

[adios]

This one is easy. Those coservatives that display superior intelligence tend to gravitate towards financial rewards rather than academic ones. Now tell me who's smarter [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[elwoodblues]

[ QUOTE ]
This one is easy. Those coservatives that display superior intelligence tend to gravitate towards financial rewards rather than academic ones. Now tell me who's smarter

[/ QUOTE ]

And yet, liberals aren't out their favoring affirmative action for liberals in corporations as conservatives are in academia.

[nicky g]

But they should be. And we must go further. There aren't nearly enough conservatives in the Green party or liberals in the Republican party.

I wonder how many liberals there are at Bob Jones university or dozens of other conservative religious schools. Should they have to hire more liberals? Should the University of Chicago Economics Department have to hire fewer free marketeers?